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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000013- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
14 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
15
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000016- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000017 an ferror() call.
18
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000019- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
20 list.sort().
21
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000022- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
23 (2+3) --> (5).
24
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000025- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
26
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000027- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
28 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000029
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000030- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
31 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
32 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
33
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000034Extension Modules
35-----------------
36
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +000037- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
38 {remove_history,replace_history}
39
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000040- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
41 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000042
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000043- stat_float_times is now True.
44
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000045- array.array objects are now picklable.
46
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000047- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
48 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
49
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000050- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
51 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
52 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
53
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000054- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
55 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000056
57Library
58-------
59
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +000060- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
61
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +000062- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
63
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +000064- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
65 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
66 be exploited in various ways.
67
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +000068- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
69
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +000070- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
71
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +000072- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
73
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000074- Enhancements to the csv module:
75
76 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
77 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
78 PEP 305.
79 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
80 reporting.
81 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
82 dictates.
83 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000084 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000085 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000086 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
87 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000088 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
89 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +000090 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000091 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
92 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
93 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
94 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
95 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
96 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
97 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
98 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
99 without first creating a dialect class.
100 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
101 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
102 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000103 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000104 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
105 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000106 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
107 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
108 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
109 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000110 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
111 This has been fixed.
112
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000113- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
114 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
115 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
116 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
117
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000118- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
119
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000120- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
121 (Bug #951915).
122
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000123- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
124 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
125 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
126 encoding alias table
127
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000128- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
129
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000130- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
131 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
132
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000133- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
134
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000135- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
136
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000137- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
138
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000139- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
140
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000141- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
142
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000143- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
144 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
145 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
146
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000147- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000148 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000149
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000150- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
151 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
152 tokenizer with very long source lines.
153
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000154- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
155 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
156
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000157- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
158 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000159
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000160- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
161 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
162
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000163Build
164-----
165
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000166- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
167 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
168
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000169- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
170 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
171 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
172 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
173 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
174 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
175 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
176 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
177
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000178- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
179 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
180 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
181 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
182
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000183
184C API
185-----
186
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000187- Removed PyRange_New().
188
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000189
190Tests
191-----
192
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000193- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000194
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000195
196Documentation
197-------------
198
199- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
200 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
201 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
202
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000203Mac
204---
205
206
207
208Tools/Demos
209-----------
210
211
212
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000213What's New in Python 2.4 final?
214===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000215
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000216*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000217
218Core and builtins
219-----------------
220
221- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
222 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
223 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
224
225
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000226What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
227==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000228
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000229*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000230
231Core and builtins
232-----------------
233
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000234- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
235 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
236 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
237
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000238
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000239Library
240-------
241
242- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
243 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
244 raised is re-raised.
245
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000246- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
247 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
248
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000249- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
250 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
251 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
252 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
253 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
254 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
255 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
256 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
257 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
258 by the slice are recomputed now.
259
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000260- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000261
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000262Build
263-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000264
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000265- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
266 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
267 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000268
269C API
270-----
271
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000272- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
273
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000274
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000275What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
276================================
277
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000278*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000279
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000280License
281-------
282
283The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
284is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
285changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
286Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
287intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
288durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
289the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
290License::
291
292 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
293
294says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
295to Python 2.1.1.
296
297The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
298License Version 2.
299
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000300Core and builtins
301-----------------
302
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000303- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
304 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
305 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
306 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
307 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
308 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
309 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
310 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
311 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
312 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
313
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000314- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000315
316Extension Modules
317-----------------
318
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000319- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
320 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
321 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
322 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000323
324Library
325-------
326
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000327- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
328 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
329 returned.
330
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000331- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
332
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000333- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
334 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
335
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000336- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
337
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000338- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
339 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000340
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000341- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
342
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000343- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
344
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000345- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000346 the source code is updated and reloaded.
347
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000348Build
349-----
350
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000351- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000352
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000353What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
354================================
355
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000356*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000357
358Core and builtins
359-----------------
360
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000361- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000362 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
363
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000364- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
365 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
366 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
367 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
368
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000369- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
370 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
371
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000372- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
373 constant.
374
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000375- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
376 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
377 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
378 large), and to anomalies such as
379 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
380 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
381 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
382 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000383
384Extension modules
385-----------------
386
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000387- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
388 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000389 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
390 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
391 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000392
393Library
394-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000395
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000396- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000397 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000398 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
399 --swig-cpp.
400
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000401- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
402 it is set.
403
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000404- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000405
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000406- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
407 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
408 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
409 Closes bug #1039270.
410
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000411- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000412
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000413 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000414 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
415 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
416 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
417 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
418 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
419 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
420 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
421 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
422 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
423 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
424 + Updates to documentation.
425
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000426- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
427 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
428 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
429 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
430
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000431- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000432
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000433- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
434 applications should use the getmember function.
435
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000436- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
437
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000438- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
439 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
440 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
441 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
442 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
443 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
444 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
445 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
446 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
447
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000448- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
449 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000450 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000451
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000452- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
453 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
454 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
455 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
456 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
457 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
458 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
459 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000460
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000461- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
462 the new public features (of which there are many).
463
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000464- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000465 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
466 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
467 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
468 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000469 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000470
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000471- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
472
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000473- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
474 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
475 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
476 options.
477
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000478- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
479 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
480 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
481 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
482 conditions under which non-string values work.
483
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000484Build
485-----
486
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000487- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
488 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
489 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
490
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000491- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
492 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
493 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
494 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
495 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000496
497C API
498-----
499
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000500- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
501 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
502
503- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
504
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000505- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
506 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
507 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
508 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
509 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
510 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
511 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
512 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
513 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
514
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000515- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
516
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000517- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
518 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
519 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000520
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000521Tests
522-----
523
524- test__locale ported to unittest
525
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000526Mac
527---
528
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000529- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
530 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
531 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000532
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000533Tools/Demos
534-----------
535
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000536- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
537 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
538 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
539 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
540 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000541
542
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000543What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
544=================================
545
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000546*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000547
548Core and builtins
549-----------------
550
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000551- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000552 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
553
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000554- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
555 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
556 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
557 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
558 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
559 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
560 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
561 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000562 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
563 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
564 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
565 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
566 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000567
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000568- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
569 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
570 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
571 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
572 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
573
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000574- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
575
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000576- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
577 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
578
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000579- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
580 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
581 modified the list.
582
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000583- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
584 functions is now writable.
585
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000586- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
587 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
588 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
589 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
590
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000591- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
592 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
593 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
594 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
595 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000596
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000597- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
598 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
599
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000600Extension modules
601-----------------
602
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000603- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
604
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000605- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
606 data.
607
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000608- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
609 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
610 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
611 supposed to have been truncated away.
612
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000613- Added socket.socketpair().
614
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000615- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
616 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
617
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000618- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000619 versions of Python, have now been removed.
620
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000621Library
622-------
623
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000624- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000625 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000626
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000627- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
628 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
629
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000630- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
631 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
632
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000633- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
634
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000635- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
636 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000637
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000638- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
639 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
640
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000641- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
642
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000643- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
644
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000645- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
646
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000647- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
648 Percivall.
649
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000650- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
651 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
652
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000653- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
654 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
655 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000656 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000657
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000658- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
659 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
660 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
661 and exponent.
662
663- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
664
665- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
666 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
667 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
668
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000669- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
670 to the readline module.
671
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000672- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000673 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
674 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000675
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000676- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
677 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
678 contains symlinks.
679
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000680- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
681 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
682
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000683- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
684 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
685 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
686
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000687- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
688 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
689 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
690 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
691 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
692 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
693 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
694 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
695 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
696 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
697 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
698 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
699 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
700
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000701- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
702
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000703Tools/Demos
704-----------
705
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000706- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
707 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
708
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000709- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
710
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000711Build
712-----
713
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000714- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
715 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
716 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
717 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
718 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
719 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
720 plans to do so.
721
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000722- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
723 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
724
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000725- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
726 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
727
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000728- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
729 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
730
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000731- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
732 GNU/k*BSD systems.
733
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000734- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
735 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
736
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000737C API
738-----
739
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000740..
741
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000742Documentation
743-------------
744
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000745- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
746 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
747
748- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
749 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
750 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000751
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000752New platforms
753-------------
754
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000755- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
756
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000757Tests
758-----
759
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000760..
761
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000762Windows
763-------
764
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000765- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
766 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
767 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
768 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
769 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
770 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
771 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
772 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
773 the problem.
774
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000775Mac
776---
777
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000778..
779
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000780
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000781What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
782=================================
783
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000784*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000785
786Core and builtins
787-----------------
788
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000789- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
790 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
791 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
792 sensitive code.
793
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000794- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000795 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000796
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000797 @staticmethod
798 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000799
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000800 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000801
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000802- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
803 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
804 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
805 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
806 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
807 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
808 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
809 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
810 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
811 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
812 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
813
814 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
815 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
816 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
817 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
818 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
819 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
820 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
821
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000822- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
823 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
824
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000825- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000826 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000827
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000828- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000829 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000830 which was missing for no apparent reason.
831
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000832- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000833 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
834 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
835
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000836- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
837 types that support garbage collection.
838
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000839- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
840
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000841- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
842 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
843 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
844 Jython.
845
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000846- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
847
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000848- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
849 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
850
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000851- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
852 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
853 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000854
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000855- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
856 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
857 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
858
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000859Extension modules
860-----------------
861
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000862- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
863
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000864Library
865-------
866
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000867- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
868 TIS-620
869
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000870- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
871 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
872 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
873 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
874 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
875 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
876 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
877 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
878 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
879 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
880
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000881- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
882
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000883- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
884 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
885 same as when the argument is omitted).
886 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
887
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000888- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
889
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000890- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
891 schemes are offered.
892
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000893- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
894
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000895- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
896 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
897 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
898
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000899- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
900
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000901- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
902 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
903
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000904- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
905 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
906 when dummy_threading is being used.
907
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000908- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
909 from a tarfile.
910
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000911- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000912 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000913
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000914- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
915 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
916 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
917 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
918
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000919- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
920 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
921
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000922- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
923 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
924 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
925 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
926 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
927 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
928 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
929 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
930 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
931 by some other method in progress).
932
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000933- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
934 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
935 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000936
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000937- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
938
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000939- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
940 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
941 AM Kuchling.
942
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000943- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
944 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
945 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
946
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000947- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
948 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
949 instead of unsigned.
950
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000951- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000952 no longer part of the public API.
953
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000954- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
955 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
956 string methods of the same name).
957
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000958- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000959 SF patch 945642.
960
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000961- doctest unittest integration improvements:
962
963 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
964
965 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
966 DocTestSuites.
967
968- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
969 that provide thread-local data.
970
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000971- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
972 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
973
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000974- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
975
976- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
977 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
978 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
979
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000980- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
981
982 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
983 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
984 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000985
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000986 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
987 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
988 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
989 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
990
991 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
992 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
993
994 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
995 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
996 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
997 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
998
999 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1000 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1001 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1002 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1003 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1004
1005 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1006 wrapping help output.
1007
1008 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1009 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1010 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001011
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001012C API
1013-----
1014
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001015- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1016 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1017 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1018 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1019 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1020 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1021 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1022 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1023 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1024 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1025 its visible semantics have not changed.
1026
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001027- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1028 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1029
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001030Documentation
1031-------------
1032
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001033- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001034
1035 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001036 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001037
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001038 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001039
1040 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1041
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001042- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001043
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001044Tests
1045-----
1046
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001047- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001048 platforms that use the Makefile.
1049
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001050- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1051 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1052 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1053
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001054
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001055What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1056=================================
1057
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001058*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001059
1060Core and builtins
1061-----------------
1062
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001063- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1064 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1065 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1066 objects now (one object instead of three).
1067
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001068- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1069 Windows DLLs.
1070
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001071- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1072 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001073
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001074- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1075 a new .pyc magic.
1076
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001077- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1078 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1079 be there.
1080
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001081- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1082 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1083 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1084
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001085- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1086 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1087 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1088
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001089- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1090
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001091- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1092 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1093 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001094
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001095- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1096 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1097
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001098- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1099
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001100- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001101 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001102
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001103- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1104
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001105- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1106
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001107- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1108 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1109
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001110- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1111 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1112 Fixes bug #858016 .
1113
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001114- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1115 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1116 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1117
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001118- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1119 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1120 improves their performance (about 35%).
1121
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001122- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1123 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1124 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1125
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001126- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1127 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1128 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1129 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1130
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001131- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1132 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1133 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1134 length is not known).
1135
1136- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1137 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001138 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1139 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001140 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1141
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001142- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1143 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1144
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001145- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1146 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1147 keyword arguments.
1148
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001149- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1150 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1151 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1152
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001153- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1154 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1155 cases.
1156
1157- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1158 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1159 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1160 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1161 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1162 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1163 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1164 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1165 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1166 a release build.
1167
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001168- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1169 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1170
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001171- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001172 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001173
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001174- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1175 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1176 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1177 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1178 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1179 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1180 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1181 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1182 destroyed.
1183
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001184- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1185 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1186 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1187 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1188 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1189 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1190 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1191 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1192
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001193- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1194 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1195 character other than a space.
1196
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001197- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1198 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1199 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1200 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1201 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1202 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1203 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1204 attributes with the same name.
1205
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001206- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1207 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1208 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1209 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1210 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1211 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1212 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1213 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1214 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1215 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1216 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1217 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1218 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1219 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001220
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001221- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1222 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1223 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1224 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1225 This has been repaired.
1226
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001227- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1228
1229- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1230
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001231- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1232 over a sequence.
1233
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001234- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001235 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001236
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001237- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1238
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001239- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1240 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1241 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1242 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1243 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1244 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1245 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1246 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1247
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001248- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1249 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1250 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1251
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001252- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1253 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1254 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1255 freelist.
1256
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001257- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1258 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1259
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001260- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1261 number.
1262
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001263- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1264 a TypeError exception.
1265
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001266- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1267 820195.
1268
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001269- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1270 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1271 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1272
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001273- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001274 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1275 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001276
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001277- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1278 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1279 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1280
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001281- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1282 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001283 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001284
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001285- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001286 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1287 the first call.
1288
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001289
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001290Extension modules
1291-----------------
1292
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001293- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1294 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1295
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001296- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1297 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1298 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1299 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1300 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1301 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1302 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001303
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001304- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1305
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001306- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1307
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001308- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1309 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1310
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001311- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1312 fewer false positives.
1313
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001314- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1315 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1316
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001317- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001318 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1319
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001320- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001321 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001322 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001323 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1324 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001325
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001326- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1327 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1328 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1329 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1330
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001331- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1332 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1333 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1334 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1335 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1336 #897625.
1337
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001338- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1339 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1340
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001341- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1342 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1343 and pops on either side of the deque.
1344
1345- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1346 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1347
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001348- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1349 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1350 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1351 other functions that expect a function argument.
1352
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001353- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1354
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001355- os.getsid was added.
1356
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001357- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1358 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1359 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1360
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001361- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1362
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001363- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1364
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001365- readline.clear_history was added.
1366
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001367- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1368
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001369- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1370
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001371- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1372
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001373- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1374
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001375- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1376
1377- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1378
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001379- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1380
1381- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1382
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001383- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1384 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1385 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1386
1387- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1388 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1389 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1390 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1391 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1392 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1393 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1394
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001395- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1396 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1397 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1398 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001399
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001400- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001401 iterators from a single iterable.
1402
1403- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1404 of raising a TypeError exception.
1405
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001406- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1407 as parameter.
1408
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001409Library
1410-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001411
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001412- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1413 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1414 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001415
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001416- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1417 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1418 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001419
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001420- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001421
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001422- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1423 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001424
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001425- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1426 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1427
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001428- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1429
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001430- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001431 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001432
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001433- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001434 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001435
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001436- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1437
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001438- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1439 on cygwin and mingw32.
1440
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001441- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1442
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001443- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1444 module.
1445
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001446- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1447 installation scheme for all platforms.
1448
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001449- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001450 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001451
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001452- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1453 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1454 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1455
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001456- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1457 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1458 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1459
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001460- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1461
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001462- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1463
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001464- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1465 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1466
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001467- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1468 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1469 type pattern with the same value exists.
1470
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001471- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1472 when run from the command prompt).
1473
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001474- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1475 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1476
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001477- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1478 default sort).
1479
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001480- Added global runctx function to profile module
1481
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001482- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1483
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001484- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1485
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001486- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1487
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001488- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001489 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1490 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1491 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1492 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1493 accordingly.
1494
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001495- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1496 decoding standards.
1497
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001498- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1499 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1500 called for all requests.
1501
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001502- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1503 they are passed to the compiler.
1504
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001505- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1506 indent, width and depth.
1507
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001508- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1509 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1510
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001511- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1512 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1513
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001514- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1515
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001516- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1517
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001518- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1519
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001520- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1521 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1522
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001523- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001524 for better performance.
1525
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001526- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001527
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001528- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1529 a string).
1530
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001531- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1532
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001533- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1534
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001535- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1536
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001537- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1538
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001539- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1540 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1541 list of fieldnames.
1542
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001543- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1544 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1545
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001546- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1547
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001548- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1549 empty lists.
1550
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001551- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1552 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1553 and shelves.
1554
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001555- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1556 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1557
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001558- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001559 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1560 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001561
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001562- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1563 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001564 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001565
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001566- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001567 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1568 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1569
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001570- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1571 and removed in Py2.4.
1572
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001573- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1574
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001575- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1576
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001577Tools/Demos
1578-----------
1579
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001580- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1581 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1582
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001583- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1584
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001585- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1586 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1587 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1588 destination in situations where both files are given.
1589
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001590- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1591 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1592 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1593 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1594
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001595- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1596
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001597- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1598 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1599 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1600 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1601 now.
1602
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001603- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1604 in effect
1605
1606- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1607 C-c C-h
1608
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001609- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1610 -d option was given.
1611
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001612Build
1613-----
1614
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001615- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1616 build under OS X.
1617
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001618- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1619 --enable-profiling.
1620
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001621- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1622 is configured --with-tsc.
1623
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001624- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1625 on AMD64.
1626
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001627- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1628 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1629
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001630- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1631 removed.
1632
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001633- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1634 supported (see PEP 11).
1635
1636- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1637
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001638- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1639
1640- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1641 (see PEP 11).
1642
1643- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1644 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1645
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001646C API
1647-----
1648
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001649- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1650 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1651 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1652
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001653- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1654 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1655 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1656 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1657
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001658- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1659 generator objects.
1660
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001661- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1662 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001663 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1664 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001665
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001666- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1667 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1668
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001669- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1670 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1671 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1672 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1673 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1674
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001675- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1676 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1677 about 10% faster.
1678
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001679- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1680 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1681
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001682- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1683 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1684 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1685 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1686
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001687Windows
1688-------
1689
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001690- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1691 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1692 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1693 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1694
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001695- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1696 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1697 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1698
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001699
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001700What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1701===============================
1702
1703*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1704
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001705IDLE
1706----
1707
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001708- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1709 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1710 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1711 context-menu actions.
1712
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001713- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1714 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1715 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1716 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1717 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1718 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1719 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1720 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1721 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1722
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001723
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001724What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1725=============================================
1726
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001727*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001728
1729Core and builtins
1730-----------------
1731
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001732- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001733 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001734 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1735
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001736Extension modules
1737-----------------
1738
1739- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1740 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1741 than once. This has been fixed.
1742
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001743- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1744 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1745 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1746 call.
1747
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001748- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1749
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001750Library
1751-------
1752
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001753- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1754 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1755
1756- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1757 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1758 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1759 restored.
1760
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001761IDLE
1762----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001763
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001764- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001765
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001766Build
1767-----
1768
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001769- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1770 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1771
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001772C API
1773-----
1774
1775Windows
1776-------
1777
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001778- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1779 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1780
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001781- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1782
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001783Mac
1784---
1785
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001786- Various fixes to pimp.
1787
1788- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1789
1790- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1791 more problems than it solves.
1792
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001793
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001794What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1795=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001796
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001797*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1798
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001799Core and builtins
1800-----------------
1801
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001802- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1803 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1804
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001805- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1806 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001807 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001808
1809- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1810 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1811 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001812 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001813
1814- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1815 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001816
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001817- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1818 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1819 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1820
1821- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001822 770247.
1823
1824- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001825
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001826Extension modules
1827-----------------
1828
1829- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1830 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1831
1832- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1833
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001834- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1835
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001836- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1837 contained within the _strptime module.
1838
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001839- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1840 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1841
1842- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001843 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1844
1845- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1846 the find_class attribute, if present.
1847
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001848- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001849
1850 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1851 (SF bug 763298).
1852
1853 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001854 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1855 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1856 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001857
1858 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1859
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001860Library
1861-------
1862
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001863- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1864
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001865- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1866 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1867 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1868 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1869 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1870 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1871 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1872 or Tester().
1873
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001874- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1875 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1876 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1877 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1878 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1879 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1880 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1881 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1882 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001883
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001884 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001885
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001886- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1887 weren't before was an oversight.
1888
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001889- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1890 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1891
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001892- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1893 when there are no lines.
1894
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001895- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1896 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1897
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001898- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1899 to child processes.
1900
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001901- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1902
1903- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1904
1905- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1906 xmlrpclib.
1907
1908- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1909 responses.
1910
1911- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1912 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1913
1914- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1915 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1916 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1917
1918- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1919 used as patterns.
1920
1921- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1922 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1923 than Tk 8.3.
1924
1925- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1926
1927- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001928
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001929Tools/Demos
1930-----------
1931
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001932- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1933
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001934- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1935
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001936- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001937
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001938Build
1939-----
1940
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001941- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1942
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001943- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1944
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001945- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1946 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001947
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001948- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1949 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1950 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001951
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001952C API
1953-----
1954
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001955- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1956 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1957
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001958Windows
1959-------
1960
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001961- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1962 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1963 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1964 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1965 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1966 Python exception ::
1967
1968 thread.error: can't start new thread
1969
1970 is raised now.
1971
1972- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1973 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1974 instead of from DLL teardown.
1975
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001976Mac
1977---
1978
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001979- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001980 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001981 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1982 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1983 the executable in the bundle.
1984
1985- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001986
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001987- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1988
1989- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1990 on Panther.
1991
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001992What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1993================================
1994
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001995*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001996
1997Core and builtins
1998-----------------
1999
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002000- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2001 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2002 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2003 with the -i option.
2004
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002005- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2006 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2007
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002008- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2009 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2010
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002011- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2012 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2013 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2014 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2015 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2016 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2017 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2018 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2019 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2020 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2021 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2022 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2023 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002024
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002025- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2026 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2027 embedded in a lambda expression.
2028
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002029- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2030 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2031 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2032 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2033 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2034
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002035- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2036 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2037 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2038
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002039- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2040 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2041
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002042- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2043 It's writable again.
2044
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002045- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2046 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2047 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002048 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002049
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002050- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2051 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2052 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2053
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002054Extension modules
2055-----------------
2056
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002057- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2058 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2059
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002060- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2061 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2062 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2063 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2064
2065- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2066 collection.
2067
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002068- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2069 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2070 unique within a single program run.
2071
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002072- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2073 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2074
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002075- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2076 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2077
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002078- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2079 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002080
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002081- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2082
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002083- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2084 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2085
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002086- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2087 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2088 for many BSD-derived systems.
2089
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002090
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002091Library
2092-------
2093
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002094- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2095 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2096 primary ones:
2097
2098 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2099 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2100 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2101
2102 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2103 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2104 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2105 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2106 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2107 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2108
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002109- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2110 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2111 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2112 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2113 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2114 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2115 argument.
2116
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002117- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2118 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2119 in the archive.
2120
2121- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2122 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2123
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002124- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2125 569574).
2126
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002127- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2128 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2129 no more.
2130
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002131- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2132 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2133 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2134 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2135 code coverage.
2136
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002137- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2138 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2139 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002140 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2141 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002142
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002143- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2144 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2145 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002146 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002147
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002148- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2149
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002150- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2151 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2152 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2153 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2154
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002155- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2156 handling.
2157
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002158- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2159 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2160
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002161- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2162 in socket.py.
2163
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002164- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2165
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002166- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2167 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2168 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2169 opener with proxy support.
2170
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002171- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2172
2173- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2174
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002175Tools/Demos
2176-----------
2177
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002178- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2179
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002180- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2181
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002182- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2183 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002184
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002185- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2186 files.
2187
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002188Build
2189-----
2190
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002191- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002192 different root directory.
2193
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002194C API
2195-----
2196
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002197- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2198 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2199 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2200 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2201 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2202 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2203 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2204 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2205 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2206 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2207
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002208- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2209 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2210 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2211 from Python.
2212
2213
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002214New platforms
2215-------------
2216
2217None this time.
2218
2219Tests
2220-----
2221
2222- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2223 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2224
2225Windows
2226-------
2227
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002228- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2229
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002230- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2231 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2232 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2233 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2234 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2235 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2236 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2237 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2238 that's what it's for.
2239
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002240Mac
2241---
2242
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002243- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2244 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2245 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2246 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002247- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2248 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2249- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002250
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002251SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2252------------------------------------
2253
2254430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2255598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2256622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2257661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2258683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2259697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2260713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2261724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2262727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2263729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2264730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2265731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2266732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2267733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2268735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2269740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2270744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2271745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2272747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2273749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2274751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2275753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2276755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2277757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2278760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2279
2280
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002281What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2282================================
2283
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002284*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002285
2286Core and builtins
2287-----------------
2288
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002289- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2290 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2291
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002292- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2293 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2294 and cannot be strings).
2295
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002296- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2297 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2298 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2299 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2300
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002301- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2302 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2303 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2304 Python itself.
2305
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002306- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2307 the referenced object, if it has one.
2308
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002309- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2310 the thread started at
2311 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2312
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002313- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2314 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2315 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2316 placed on a list index.
2317
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002318- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2319 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2320 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2321 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2322
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002323- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2324 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2325 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2326 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2327 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2328 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2329 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2330
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002331- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2332 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2333 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2334 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2335 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2336
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002337- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2338 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002339
2340- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2341 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2342 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2343 #693195.)
2344
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002345- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2346 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002347
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002348- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002349 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002350 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2351 interpreter executions, would fail.
2352
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002353- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002354 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002355 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002356
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002357Extension modules
2358-----------------
2359
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002360- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2361 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2362 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2363 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2364
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002365- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2366 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2367
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002368- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2369 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2370 and Greg Chapman.)
2371
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002372- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2373 recursively.
2374
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002375- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002376 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2377 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2378 leaks.
2379
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002380- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2381
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002382- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2383 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2384 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2385 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2386 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2387 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2388 #705836.
2389
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002390- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002391 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2392
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002393- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2394 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2395 See SF bug #692416.
2396
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002397- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2398 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2399
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002400- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2401 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2402 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002403
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002404- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002405 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2406 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2407
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002408- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2409 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2410 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2411 timeouts to work properly.
2412
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002413Library
2414-------
2415
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002416- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2417 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2418 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2419 future release.
2420
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002421- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2422 for querying platform dependent features.
2423
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002424- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002425
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002426- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2427 pickle protocol versions.
2428
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002429- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2430 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2431 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2432
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002433- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2434
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002435- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2436 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2437 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2438 modules.
2439
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002440- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2441 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2442 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2443
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002444- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2445 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2446
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002447- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2448 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2449 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2450
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002451- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002452 MS Office extensions.
2453
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002454- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2455 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2456
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002457- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2458 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2459
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002460- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2461 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2462 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2463 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2464 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2465 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2466
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002467- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2468 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2469 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002470
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002471- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2472 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2473 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2474
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002475- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2476
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002477- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2478 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2479 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2480
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002481Tools/Demos
2482-----------
2483
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002484- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2485 See the module docstring for details.
2486
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002487Build
2488-----
2489
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002490- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2491 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002492
2493C API
2494-----
2495
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002496- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2497
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002498- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2499 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2500 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2501
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002502- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2503 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002504
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002505 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2506 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2507 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002508
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002509- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002510 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2511
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002512- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2513 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2514 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002515
2516New platforms
2517-------------
2518
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002519None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002520
2521Tests
2522-----
2523
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002524- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2525 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002526
2527Windows
2528-------
2529
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002530- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2531 function.
2532
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002533- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2534 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002535
2536Mac
2537---
2538
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002539- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2540 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002541
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002542- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2543 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002544
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002545- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2546 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2547 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002548
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002549- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002550 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2551 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002552
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002553- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2554 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002555
2556
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002557What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2558=================================
2559
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002560*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002561
2562Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002563-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002564
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002565- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2566 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2567 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2568
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002569- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2570 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2571 (SF patch #664376.)
2572
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002573- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2574 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2575 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2576 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2577 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2578 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002579 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002580
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002581- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2582 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2583 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2584 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002585 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002586
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002587- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2588 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2589 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2590 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2591 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2592 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2593 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2594 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2595 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2596 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2597 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2598
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002599- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2600 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2601 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2602 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2603 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2604 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2605
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002606- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2607 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2608
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002609- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2610 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2611 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2612 case.)
2613
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002614- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2615 passed as unicode strings.
2616
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002617- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2618 See SF bug #683467.
2619
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002620- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2621 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2622
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002623- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2624
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002625- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2626
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002627- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2628 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2629 arguments.
2630
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002631- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2632 See SF bug #667147.
2633
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002634- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002635 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002636 See SF bug #676155.
2637
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002638- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002639 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002640 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2641 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2642 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2643 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2644 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2645 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002646
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002647Extension modules
2648-----------------
2649
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002650- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2651 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2652 tp_as_number pointer.
2653
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002654- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2655 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2656 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2657 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2658 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2659
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002660- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2661
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002662- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2663
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002664- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002665 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002666 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2667 patch #678531.)
2668
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002669- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2670 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2671
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002672- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2673 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2674
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002675- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2676
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002677- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2678 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2679 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2680
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002681- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2682
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002683- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2684 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2685
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002686- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002687
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002688- datetime changes:
2689
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002690 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2691
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002692 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2693 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2694 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2695 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2696 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2697 now.
2698
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002699 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002700 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2701 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002702
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002703 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002704 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002705 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2706 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2707 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2708 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002709
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002710 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2711 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2712 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002713 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2714
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002715 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2716 by a later example coded by Guido.
2717
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002718 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002719 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2720 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2721 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002722 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2723 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2724
2725 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2726 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2727 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2728 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2729 tzinfo subclass instance.
2730
2731 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2732 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2733 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2734 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2735 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2736 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2737 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2738 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002739
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002740 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2741 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2742 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2743 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2744 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002745 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2746
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002747 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002748
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002749 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2750 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2751 as a naive datetime object.
2752
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002753 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2754 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2755 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2756
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002757 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2758 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2759 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2760 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2761 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2762 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2763 comparison.
2764
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002765 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2766 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2767 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2768 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002769 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002770
2771 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002772
2773 and ::
2774
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002775 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2776
2777 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2778 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2779 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2780 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2781
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002782 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2783 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2784 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2785 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2786 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2787
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002788 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2789 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002790 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2791 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002792
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002793Library
2794-------
2795
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002796- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2797 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2798
2799- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2800 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2801 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2802 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2803 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2804 See PEP 307 for details.
2805
2806- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2807 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2808
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002809- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2810 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002811 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002812 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2813 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002814 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002815
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002816- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2817 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2818
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002819- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2820 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2821 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2822
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002823- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2824
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002825- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2826 exception.
2827
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002828- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2829 class.
2830
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002831- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2832 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2833 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2834
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002835- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2836 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2837
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002838- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002839 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2840 See SF bug #659228.
2841
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002842- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2843 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2844 See SF patch #651082.
2845
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002846- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002847
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002848- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2849 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2850
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002851- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002852 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002853
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002854- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2855 DOS paths from other platforms.
2856
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002857Tools/Demos
2858-----------
2859
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002860- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2861 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2862 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2863 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2864 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2865 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2866 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2867 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2868 example:
2869
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002870 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2871 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002872
2873 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2874
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002875
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002876Build
2877-----
2878
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002879- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2880 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2881 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002882 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2883
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002884 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2885
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002886- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2887 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2888 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2889 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2890 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2891 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2892 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2893 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2894 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2895
2896- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2897 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2898 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2899 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2900
2901- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2902 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2903
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002904C API
2905-----
2906
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002907- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2908 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002909
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002910- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2911 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2912 tp_as_number pointer.
2913
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002914- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2915 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2916 (SF #681367)
2917
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002918- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2919 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2920 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2921 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002922
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002923Tests
2924-----
2925
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002926- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002927 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2928 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2929 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2930 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2931 pydoc.)
2932
2933- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2934
2935- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002936
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002937Windows
2938-------
2939
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002940- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2941 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2942 time).
2943
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002944- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2945 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2946
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002947- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2948 release without strong cryptography.
2949
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002950- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002951 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002952
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002953- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2954 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2955
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002956Mac
2957---
2958
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002959- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2960 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002961
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002962- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2963 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2964 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002965
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002966- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2967 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002968
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002969- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2970 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2971 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2972 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002973
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002974- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002975 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2976 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2977 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002978
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002979
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002980What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002981=================================
2982
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002983*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002984
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002985Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002986--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002987
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002988- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2989
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002990- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2991 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002992 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002993 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002994 a different meaning than before.
2995
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002996- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002997 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002998 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002999
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003000- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003001 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003002 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003003
3004- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3005 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3006 and deallocation.
3007
3008- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3009 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3010
3011- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3012 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3013 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3014 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3015 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3016
3017- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3018 now detected by the garbage collector.
3019
3020- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3021 [SF bug 519621]
3022
3023- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3024 identifier.
3025
3026- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3027 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3028 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3029 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3030 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3031 [SF bug 563060]
3032
3033- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3034 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3035 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3036 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3037 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3038
3039- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3040 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3041 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3042
3043- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3044
3045- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3046 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3047 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3048 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3049 state of the slots would be lost.)
3050
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003051Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003052-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003053
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003054- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003055 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3056 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3057 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3058 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003059 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3060 Jython 2.1.
3061
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003062- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003063 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003064 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3065 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3066 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3067 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3068 these, see PEP 302.
3069
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003070- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3071 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3072 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3073
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003074- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3075 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3076 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3077
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003078- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3079 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3080 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3081
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003082- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3083 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3084 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3085 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3086 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3087 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3088 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3089 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3090 releases or implementations.
3091
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003092- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003093 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3094 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003095
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003096- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3097 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3098
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003099- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3100 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3101 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3102
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003103- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3104 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3105
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003106- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3107 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003108 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3109 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003110
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003111- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3112 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3113 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3114 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3115 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3116
3117 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3118 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3119 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3120 pattern.
3121
3122 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3123 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3124 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3125 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3126
3127 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3128 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3129 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3130 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3131 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3132 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3133
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003134- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3135 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3136 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3137 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3138 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3139 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3140 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3141 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003142
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003143- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3144 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3145 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3146 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3147 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003148 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3149 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3150 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3151 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3152 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3153 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3154 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003155
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003156- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3157 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3158
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003159- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3160 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3161 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3162 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3163 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3164 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3165 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3166 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3167 to Zack Weinberg!
3168
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003169- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3170 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3171 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3172 type. This has been fixed now.
3173
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003174- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3175 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3176 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3177
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003178- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3179 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3180 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3181 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3182 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3183 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3184 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3185 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003186 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003187
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003188- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3189 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3190 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003191
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003192- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3193 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3194 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3195 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3196 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3197 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3198 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3199 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003200 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003201 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3202 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3203
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003204- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3205 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3206 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3207 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3208 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3209 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3210 this.)
3211
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003212- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3213 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003214 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003215 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003216 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3217 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003218 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3219 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003220
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003221- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3222 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3223 currently running.
3224
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003225- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3226 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3227 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3228 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3229
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003230- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3231 as directory names.
3232
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003233- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3234 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3235
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003236- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3237 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3238
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003239- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003240 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3241 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003242
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003243- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3244 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3245 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3246 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3247 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3248
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003249- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3250 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3251 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3252 removed.
3253
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003254- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3255 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3256 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3257
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003258- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3259 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3260 to __debug__.
3261
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003262- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3263 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3264 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3265
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003266- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3267 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3268 deprecated now.
3269
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003270- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3271 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3272 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003273
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003274- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3275 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3276 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3277 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3278 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003279
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003280- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3281 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3282
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003283- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3284 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3285 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003286 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003287 is backward compatible.
3288
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003289- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3290 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3291 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3292 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3293 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3294
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003295- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3296 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3297 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3298 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3299 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3300 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003301
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003302- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3303 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3304
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003305- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3306 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3307
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003308- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3309 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3310 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3311 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3312 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3313
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003314- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3315 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3316 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3317
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003318- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003319 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3320
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003321- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3322 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3323 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003324
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003325- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3326 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3327
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003328- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3329 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3330 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3331
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003332- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3333
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003334Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003335-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003336
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003337- Added three operators to the operator module:
3338 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3339 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3340 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3341
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003342- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3343
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003344- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3345 archives.
3346
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003347- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3348 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3349 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3350
3351 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3352
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003353- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3354 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3355 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003356 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003357
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003358- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3359 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3360 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3361 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003362 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3363 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3364 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3365 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003366
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003367- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3368 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003369
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003370- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3371
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003372- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3373 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3374
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003375- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3376 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3377 supported.
3378
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003379- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3380
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003381- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3382 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003383
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003384- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3385 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3386
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003387- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3388
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003389- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3390 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3391
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003392- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3393 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3394 functions but callable type objects.
3395
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003396- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003397 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003398 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003399
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003400- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3401 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003402
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003403- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3404 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003405
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003406- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3407 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3408 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3409 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3410
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003411- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3412 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003413
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003414- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3415 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3416 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3417 and __imul__.
3418
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003419- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003420 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3421 is called.
3422
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003423- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3424 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3425 interpreter was compiled.
3426
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003427- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3428 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3429 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003430 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003431 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3432 1, not 2.
3433
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003434- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3435 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3436 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3437 limit.
3438
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003439- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3440 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3441 bug #623464.
3442
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003443- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3444 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3445 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3446 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3447
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003448Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003449-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003450
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003451- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3452
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003453- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3454 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3455 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3456 with Python 2.3a2.
3457
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003458- os.path exposes getctime.
3459
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003460- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003461 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003462 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003463 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003464 unit tests of floating point results.
3465
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003466- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3467 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3468 has been increased.
3469
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003470- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3471 executed.
3472
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003473- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3474 postinstallation script.
3475
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003476- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3477 test the current module.
3478
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003479- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003480 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3481 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3482 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3483 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3484
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003485- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003486 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003487 Ward's Optik package.
3488
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003489- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3490 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3491 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3492 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3493
3494- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3495 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003496 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003497
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003498- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3499 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3500 shelf are binary pickles.
3501
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003502- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3503 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3504
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003505- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3506 modules are iterators now.
3507
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003508- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3509 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3510 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3511 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3512 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3513 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003514
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003515- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3516 with their entity value.
3517
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003518- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3519
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003520- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3521 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003522
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003523- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3524 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003525 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003526
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003527- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3528 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3529 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3530 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3531 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3532 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3533 main():
3534
3535 import locale
3536 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3537
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003538- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3539 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3540
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003541- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3542 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3543 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3544 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3545 to the new standard.
3546
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003547- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3548 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3549 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3550 an extension to the database.
3551
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003552- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3553 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3554 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3555 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003556 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003557
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003558- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003559 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003560
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003561- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3562 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3563 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3564 bounded integers.
3565
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003566- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3567 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3568 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3569 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3570 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3571 in existence.
3572
3573 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3574 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3575 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3576 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3577 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3578 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3579
3580 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3581 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3582 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3583 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3584
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003585- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3586 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3587 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3588
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003589- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3590
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003591- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3592 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3593 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3594 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3595
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003596- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3597 argument.
3598
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003599- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3600 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3601 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3602 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3603 [SF patch 560794].
3604
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003605- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3606 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3607 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003608 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3609 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3610 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003611
3612- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3613 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003614
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003615- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3616 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3617 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3618 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003619
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003620- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3621 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3622 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3623 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3624 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3625
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003626- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003627
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003628- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3629
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003630- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3631 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3632 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3633 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3634 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3635 identical to None.
3636
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003637- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3638 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3639 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3640 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3641 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3642 results now.
3643
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003644- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3645 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3646
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003647- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3648 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3649 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3650 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3651 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3652 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3653 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3654 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3655
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003656- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3657
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003658- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3659 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3660
3661- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3662 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3663 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3664 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3665 and other systems.
3666
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003667- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3668 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3669 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3670 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 +00003671 work well with these.
3672
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003673- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3674
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003675- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003676 connections.
3677
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003678- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3679 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3680 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3681
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003682- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3683 sets
3684
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003685- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3686 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3687 name.
3688
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003689- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3690 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3691 passed in.
3692
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003693- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003694 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003695 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3696 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003697
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003698- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3699
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003700- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3701
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003702- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3703 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3704 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3705
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003706- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3707 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3708 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3709 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003710 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003711
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003712- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003713 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003714 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003715
3716- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3717 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3718 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3719
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003720- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003721 the value of its expression argument.
3722
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003723- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3724 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3725 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3726
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003727- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3728 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3729 skipstone browser was included.
3730
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003731- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3732 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3733
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003734Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003735-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003736
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003737- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3738 names in addition to accepting file names.
3739
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003740- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3741 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3742 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3743 still used and useful.)
3744
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003745- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3746 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3747 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3748 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003749
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003750- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3751 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3752 the generated binary.
3753
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003754Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003755-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003756
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003757- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3758
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003759- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3760 except in the hands of experts.
3761
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003762- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003763 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3764 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3765 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003766
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003767- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3768 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3769 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3770 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3771 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3772 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3773 builds.
3774
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003775- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3776 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3777 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3778 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3779 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3780 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3781 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3782 new type.
3783
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003784- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003785
3786 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3787 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3788 positive infinities.
3789
3790 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3791 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3792 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3793 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3794 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3795 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3796 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3797
3798 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3799
3800 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3801
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003802- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3803 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3804 size of the executable.
3805
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003806- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3807 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3808 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3809 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003810
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003811- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3812
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003813- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3814 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3815 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003816
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003817- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3818 well as Unix.
3819
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003820- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3821 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3822 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3823 modules in the README file for details.
3824
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003825C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003826-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003827
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003828- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3829 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003830 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003831 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003832 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003833
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003834- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3835 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3836 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3837 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3838 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3839 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003840 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003841 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3842 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3843 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3844 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3845 aligned.)
3846
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003847- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3848 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3849 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3850
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003851- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3852 level.
3853
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003854- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3855 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3856 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3857 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3858 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3859
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003860- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3861 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3862 code.
3863
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003864- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3865 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3866 adjusting for negative indices.
3867
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003868- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3869 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3870 object.
3871
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003872- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3873 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3874 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3875
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003876- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3877 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003878
3879- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3880
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003881- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3882 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3883 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3884 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3885
3886- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3887
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003888- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003889
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003890- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003891 without going through the buffer API.
3892
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003893- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003894
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003895- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3896 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3897 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3898 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3899
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003900- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3901 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3902
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003903- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003904 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3905
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003906New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003907-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003908
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003909- OpenVMS is now supported.
3910
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003911- AtheOS is now supported.
3912
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003913- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3914
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003915- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3916
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003917Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003918-----
3919
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003920- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3921 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3922 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003923
3924Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003925-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003926
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003927- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3928 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3929 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3930 bugs.
3931 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003932 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003933 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3934 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003935 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003936
3937- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003938 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003939
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003940- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3941 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3942
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003943- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3944 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003945 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003946 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3947
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003948- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3949 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3950 use files" uninstall option).
3951
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003952- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3953
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003954- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3955 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3956
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003957- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3958 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3959 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3960
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003961- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3962 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3963 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3964 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3965 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003966 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3967 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3968 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003969
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003970- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003971 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003972 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3973 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3974 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3975 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3976 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3977 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3978 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3979 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3980 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3981 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3982 work around.
3983
3984- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3985 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3986 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3987 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3988 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3989 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3990 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3991 specified with O_CREAT too).
3992
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003993Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003994----
3995
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003996- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003997
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003998- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3999 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4000 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4001
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004002- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4003 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4004 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4005
4006- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4007 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4008 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4009 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4010 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4011 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4012 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4013 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004014
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004015- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4016 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4017 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004018
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004019- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4020 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4021 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4022 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4023 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004024
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004025- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4026 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4027 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004028
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004029- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4030 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004031
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004032- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4033 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4034 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4035 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4036 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004037
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004038- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4039 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4040 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4041
4042- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4043 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4044 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004045
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004046- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4047 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4048 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4049 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004050 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004051
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004052- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4053 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004054
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004055- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4056 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004057
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004058- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004059 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004060 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4061 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004062
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004063
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004064What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004065===============================
4066
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004067*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4068
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004069Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004070--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004071
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004072- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4073 with a custom metaclass.
4074
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004075Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004076-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004077
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004078- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4079 are proxies.
4080
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004081Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004082-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004083
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004084- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4085 very short strings.
4086
4087- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4088 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4089 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4090 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4091 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4092
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004093Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004094-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004095
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004096- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4097 close or delete time).
4098
4099- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4100 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4101
4102- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4103
4104- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004105 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004106
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004107Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004108-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004109
4110Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004111-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004112
4113C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004114-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004115
4116New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004117-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004118
4119Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004120-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004121
4122Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004123-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004124
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004125- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4126
4127- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4128 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4129
4130- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4131 deleted at process exit time.
4132
4133- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4134 in backslash.
4135
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004136Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004137----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004138
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004139- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4140 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4141 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4142
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004143
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004144What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004145===========================
4146
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004147*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4148
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004149Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004150--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004151
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004152- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4153 been extensively updated. See
4154
4155 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4156
4157 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4158
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004159- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4160 deleted!
4161
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004162- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4163 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4164 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4165 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4166 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4167
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004168- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4169
4170 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4171 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4172
4173 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4174 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4175 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4176 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4177 supported anyway.
4178
4179 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4180 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4181
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004182- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4183 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4184 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4185 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4186 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004187
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004188- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4189 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4190 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4191
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004192Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004193-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004194
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004195- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4196 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4197 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4198 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4199 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4200 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004201 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4202 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4203 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4204 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004205
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004206- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4207 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4208 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4209
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004210Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004211-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004212
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004213- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4214
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004215Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004216-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004217
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004218- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4219 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4220 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4221 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4222 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4223 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4224
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004225- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4226
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004227- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4228
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004229- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4230
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004231- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4232 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4233 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4234
4235- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4236
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004237Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004238-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004239
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004240- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4241 off a search on Google.
4242
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004243Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004244-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004245
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004246- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4247 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4248 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4249 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4250 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4251 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4252 other platforms should do likewise.
4253
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004254- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4255 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4256 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4257
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004258C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004259-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004260
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004261- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4262 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4263 producing key-value pairs.
4264
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004265- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004266 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004267 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4268 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4269 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4270 previously went unchallenged.
4271
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004272New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004273-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004274
4275Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004276-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004277
4278Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004279-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004280
4281Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004282----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004283
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004284- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4285 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004286
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004287- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4288 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4289 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4290 home.
4291
4292
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004293What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004294===========================
4295
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004296*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4297
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004298Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004299--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004300
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004301- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4302 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004303
4304 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004305 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004306
4307 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4308 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004309 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004310 This needs to be documented.
4311
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004312- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4313 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4314
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004315- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4316 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4317 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4318
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004319- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4320 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4321
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004322- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4323 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4324 class forbids it).
4325
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004326- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4327 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4328 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4329
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004330- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4331
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004332Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004333-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004334
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004335- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4336 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004337 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004338
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004339- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4340 (like 1 + '').
4341
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004342Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004343-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004344
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004345- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4346 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4347 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4348 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004349 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004350 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4351
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004352- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4353 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4354 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4355 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4356
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004357- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4358 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004359 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4360 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4361 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004362
4363- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4364 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004365
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004366- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4367 bytes on its input.
4368
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004369Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004370-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004371
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004372- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004373 convenience function.
4374
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004375- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4376 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4377 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004378 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4379 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4380 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4381 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4382 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4383 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004384
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004385- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4386 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4387 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4388 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4389
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004390- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4391 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4392 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4393
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004394- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4395 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4396 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4397 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4398
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004399- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4400 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004401 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004402 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4403 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4404 new -l and -e options.
4405
4406- statcache is now deprecated.
4407
4408- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4409 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004410 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004411 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4412 time properly taken into account.
4413
4414- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4415 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4416 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4417 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4418
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004419Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004420-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004421
4422Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004423-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004424
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004425- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4426 is built with libdb3 if available.
4427
4428- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4429
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004430C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004431-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004432
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004433- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4434 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4435 PySequence_Size().
4436
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004437- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4438
4439- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4440 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4441 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4442
4443- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4444 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4445
4446- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4447 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4448
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004449New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004450-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004451
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004452- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4453 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4454
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004455- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4456 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4457
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004458- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4459
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004460Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004461-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004462
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004463- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4464 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4465
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004466Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004467-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004468
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004469Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004470----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004471
4472- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4473 removed completely in the next release.
4474
4475- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4476 OSX.
4477
4478- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4479 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4480
4481- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4482
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004483
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004484What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004485===========================
4486
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004487*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4488
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004489Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004490--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004491
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004492- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004493 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004494 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004495 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4496 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004497 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4498 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004499 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4500 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004501
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004502- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4503 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4504
4505- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4506 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4507
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004508Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004509-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004510
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004511- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4512 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4513 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4514 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4515 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4516 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4517 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4518 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4519
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004520- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4521 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4522 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4523 example).
4524
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004525- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004526 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004527 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004528 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004529
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004530- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4531 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4532 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004533 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004534
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004535- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4536 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4537 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4538 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4539 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4540 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4541
4542 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4543
4544 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4545
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004546Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004547-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004548
4549- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4550
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004551- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4552
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004553- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4554 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004555
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004556- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4557 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4558 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4559 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4560 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4561 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004562 attributes.
4563
4564- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4565 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4566 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004567
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004568- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4569 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4570 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004571
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004572- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4573 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4574 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004575 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4576 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4577
4578- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4579 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004580
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004581Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004582-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004583
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004584- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4585 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4586
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004587- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4588 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4589 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4590 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4591
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004592- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4593 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4594 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4595 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4596
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004597 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4598 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4599 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4600 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4601 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4602 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4603 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4604 without losing information).
4605
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004606- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004607 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4608 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4609 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4610 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4611 module).
4612
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004613 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004614 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4615 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4616 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4617 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004618
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004619- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004620 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4621 encoding.
4622
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004623- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4624 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4625
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004626- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004627 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4628
4629- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4630 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4631 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4632 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4633
4634- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4635
4636- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4637 ON, and OFF.
4638
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004639- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4640 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4641
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004642Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004643-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004644
4645- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4646 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4647 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004648
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004649- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4650 been added: -X and -E.
4651
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004652Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004653-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004654
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004655- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4656 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4657
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004658C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004659-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004660
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004661- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4662 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4663 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4664 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4665 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4666
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004667- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4668 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4669 as long) arguments.
4670
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004671- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4672 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4673 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4674 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4675 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4676 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4677
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004678- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4679 input.
4680
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004681New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004682-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004683
4684Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004685-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004686
4687Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004688-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004689
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004690- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4691 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4692 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4693
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004694- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4695 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4696 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004697 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004698
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004699 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4700 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4701 import signal
4702 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004703
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004704 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004705 while 1:
4706 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004707 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004708 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4709 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4710 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4711 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004712
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004713
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004714What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4715===========================
4716
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004717*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4718
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004719Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004720--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004721
4722- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4723 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4724 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4725
4726- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4727 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4728 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4729 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4730 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4731 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4732 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004733
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004734- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004735 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004736 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4737 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4738 associate a docstring with a property.
4739
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004740- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4741 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4742 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4743 other built-in object types.
4744
4745- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4746 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4747 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4748 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4749 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4750
4751- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4752 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4753
4754- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4755 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004756 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004757 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4758 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4759 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4760 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4761 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4762
4763- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4764 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4765 class.
4766
4767- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4768 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4769 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4770 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4771
4772- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4773 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4774 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4775 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4776
4777- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4778 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4779
4780- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4781 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4782 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4783 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4784 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004785 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004786 with the same value as s.
4787
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004788- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4789
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004790Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004791----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004792
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004793- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4794
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004795- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4796 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4797 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4798 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4799 objects.
4800
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004801- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4802 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004803 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4804 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4805
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004806- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4807 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4808 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4809
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004810Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004811-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004812
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004813- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4814 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4815 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4816 by the instances.
4817
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004818- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4819 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4820 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4821
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004822- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4823 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4824 before the entire comparison is complete.
4825
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004826- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4827 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4828 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4829
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004830- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4831 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4832 getwriter().
4833
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004834- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4835 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4836
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004837- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004838 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4839 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4840
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004841- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4842 iterable object.
4843
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004844- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4845 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004846
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004847- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4848 authentication.
4849
4850- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4851 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004852
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004853- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004854 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4855 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4856 a sample driver.)
4857
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004858Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004859-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004860
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004861- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4862 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4863 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4864 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4865 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4866 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4867 kernel has large file support.
4868
4869- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4870 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4871 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4872 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4873 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4874
4875- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4876 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4877 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4878
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004879C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004880-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004881
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004882- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4883 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4884
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004885New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004886-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004887
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004888- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4889 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4890
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004891Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004892-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004893
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004894- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4895 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4896 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4897 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4898 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4899
4900- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4901 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4902 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4903 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4904
4905- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4906 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4907
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004908Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004909-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004910
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004911- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004912 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4913 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004914
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004915
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004916What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4917===========================
4918
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004919*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4920
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004921Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004922----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004923
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004924- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4925 big to represent as a C double.
4926
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004927- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4928 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4929 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4930 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4931 restriction).
4932
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004933- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4934 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4935 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4936 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4937 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4938
4939 >>> dir([])
4940 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4941 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4942 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4943 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4944 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4945 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4946 'reverse', 'sort']
4947
4948 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4949
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004950- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004951 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4952 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4953 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4954 OverflowError exception.
4955
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004956- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004957 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004958 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4959 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4960 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4961 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4962 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004963 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004964 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4965 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4966
4967 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4968 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4969 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4970 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004971
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004972- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004973 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4974 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4975 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4976 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4977 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4978 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4979 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4980 once it is created.
4981
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004982- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4983 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4984 (key, value) pairs.
4985
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004986- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004987 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4988 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4989
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004990- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4991 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4992 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4993 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4994 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004995
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004996- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004997 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4998 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4999
5000 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5001
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005002- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005003 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5004
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005005Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005006-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005007
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005008- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005009 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5010 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005011
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005012- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5013 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5014 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5015 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5016 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5017 in this area anymore).
5018
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005019- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5020 threading.Timer.
5021
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005022- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5023 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5024
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005025- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005026 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5027
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005028- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005029 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5030 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5031 converted to Python longs.
5032
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005033- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005034 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5035
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005036- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5037 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5038 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5039
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005040Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005041-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005042
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005043- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5044 division operators as per PEP 238.
5045
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005046Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005047-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005048
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005049- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5050 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5051 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5052 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5053
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005054C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005055-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005056
5057- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005058
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005059- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5060 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005061 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005062
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005063 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5064 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005065 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005066 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005067
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005068- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005069 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5070 module:
5071
5072 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005073
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005074 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5075 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005076
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005077 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5078 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005079
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005080 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5081
5082 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5083
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005084- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005085 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5086 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5087 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005088
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005089New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005090-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005091
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005092- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5093 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5094 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5095 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5096 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005097
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005098Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005099-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005100
5101Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005102-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005103
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005104- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5105 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5106 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5107 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005108 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5109 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5110 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5111 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5112 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005113
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005114- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005115 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5116
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005117
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005118What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5119===========================
5120
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005121*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5122
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005123Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005124-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005125
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005126- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5127 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5128
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005129- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5130 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5131 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005132
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005133- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5134 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5135 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5136 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005137
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005138- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5139
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005140- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005141
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005142Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005143-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005144
5145- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005146 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005147 the module docstring for details.
5148
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005149Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005150-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005151
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005152- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005153 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5154 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5155 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005156
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005157- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5158 Nick Mathewson.
5159
5160Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005161----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005162
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005163- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5164 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5165 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5166 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5167 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5168 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5169 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5170 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5171
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005172- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5173 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5174 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5175 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5176
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005177- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5178 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5179 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5180 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5181 come a long way).
5182
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005183- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5184 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5185 write filters for these warnings).
5186
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005187- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5188 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5189 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5190 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5191 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5192
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005193- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5194 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5195 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5196 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5197 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5198 older distribution.
5199
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005200Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005201-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005202
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005203- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5204 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005205 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005206
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005207- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5208 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5209 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5210
5211- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5212
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005213- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5214
5215- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5216
5217- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5218
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005219- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005220
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005221- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5222
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005223New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005224-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005225
5226C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005227-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005228
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005229- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5230 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5231 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5232 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5233 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5234 against buffer overruns.
5235
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005236- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005237 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5238 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005239 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5240 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5241 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5242
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005243- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5244 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5245 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5246 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5247 deprecated.
5248
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005249Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005250-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005251
5252- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5253 relevant is found.
5254
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005255
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005256What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005257===========================
5258
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005259*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5260
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005261Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005262----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005263
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005264- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5265 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5266 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5267 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5268 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5269 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5270 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5271 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005272 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005273 repaired.
5274
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005275- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005276 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005277 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5278 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5279 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5280 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5281 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5282 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5283 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5284 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5285
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005286- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5287 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5288 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5289 leading BMO character).
5290
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005291- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5292 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5293 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5294
5295 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5296 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5297 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005298
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005299 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5300 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5301 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5302 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5303 for various simple to use conversions.
5304
5305 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5306 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5307
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005308 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5309 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5310 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5311 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5312 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5313 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5314 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5315 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5316 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5317 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5318 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5319 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5320 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5321 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5322 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005323
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005324- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5325 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5326 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005327 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005328 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005329
5330 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005331 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5332 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5333 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5334 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5335 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005336 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5337 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005338
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005339 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5340 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5341 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005342 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005343
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005344- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5345 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5346 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5347 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5348 floating arithmetic,
5349
5350 x = 9007199254740992.0
5351 print long(x)
5352
5353 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5354 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5355 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5356 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5357 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5358 functions are of good quality).
5359
5360 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5361 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5362 algorithms to break.
5363
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005364- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5365 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5366 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5367 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5368 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5369 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5370 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5371 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5372 order.
5373
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005374- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5375 operation along the most common code paths.
5376
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005377- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5378 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5379
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005380- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5381 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5382 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5383 {}.update(UserDict())
5384
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005385- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5386 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5387 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5388 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5389 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5390 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5391 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5392 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5393
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005394- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005395 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005396
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005397 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005398 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5399 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005400 join() method of strings
5401 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005402 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5403 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005404 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005405 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005406
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005407- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5408 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5409
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005410- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5411 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5412
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005413- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5414 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5415 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5416 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5417
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005418- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5419 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005420 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005421 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5422 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005423
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005424- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5425
5426
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005427Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005428-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005429
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005430- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005431 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005432 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5433 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5434
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005435- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5436 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5437
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005438- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5439 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5440 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5441 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5442
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005443- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5444 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5445 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5446
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005447- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5448
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005449- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5450
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005451- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5452 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5453 that are still imported into string.py).
5454
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005455- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5456
5457- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5458 Now it does.
5459
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005460- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5461
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005462- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5463 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5464 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5465 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5466 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005467 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5468 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005469
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005470- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5471 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5472 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5473 'help(object)'.
5474
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005475Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005476-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005477
5478- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005479 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005480 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5481 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5482
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005483- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005484 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5485 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005486
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005487C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005488-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005489
5490- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5491 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005492
5493----
5494
5495**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**