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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
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Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +000015- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
16 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
17
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +000018- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
19
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000020- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
21 new documentation and modified profiler and bdb modules for more details
22
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +000023- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
24
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +000025- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
26
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +000027- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
28 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
29
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +000030- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
31 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
32 Fixes bug #858016 .
33
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000034- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
35 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
36 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
37
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000038- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
39 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
40 improves their performance (about 35%).
41
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000042- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
43 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
44 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
45
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000046- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
47 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
48 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
49 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
50
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000051- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
52 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
53 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
54 length is not known).
55
56- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
57 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000058 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
59 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000060 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
61
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +000062- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
63 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
64
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000065- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
66 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
67 keyword arguments.
68
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000069- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
70 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
71 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
72
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000073- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
74 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
75 cases.
76
77- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
78 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
79 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
80 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
81 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
82 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
83 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
84 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
85 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
86 a release build.
87
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +000088- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
89 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
90
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000091- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +000092 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000093
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +000094- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
95 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
96 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
97 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
98 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
99 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
100 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
101 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
102 destroyed.
103
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000104- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
105 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
106 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
107 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
108 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
109 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
110 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
111 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
112
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000113- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
114 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
115 character other than a space.
116
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000117- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
118 by the function object or by the method object, the function
119 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
120 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
121 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
122 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
123 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
124 attributes with the same name.
125
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000126- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
127 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
128 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
129 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
130 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
131 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
132 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
133 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
134 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
135 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
136 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
137 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
138 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
139 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000140
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000141- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
142 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
143 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
144 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
145 This has been repaired.
146
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000147- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
148
149- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
150
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000151- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
152 over a sequence.
153
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000154- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000155 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000156
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000157- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
158
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000159- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
160 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
161 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
162 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
163 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
164 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
165 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
166 records with equal keys is unchanged).
167
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000168- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
169 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
170 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
171
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000172- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
173 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
174 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
175 freelist.
176
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000177- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
178 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
179
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000180- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
181 number.
182
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000183- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
184 a TypeError exception.
185
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000186- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
187 820195.
188
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000189- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
190 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
191 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
192
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000193- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
194 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
195 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000196
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000197- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
198 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
199 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
200
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000201- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
202 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000203 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000204
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000205- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000206 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
207 the first call.
208
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000209
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000210Extension modules
211-----------------
212
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000213- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
214
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000215- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
216 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
217
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000218- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
219 fewer false positives.
220
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000221- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
222 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
223
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000224- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
225 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
226
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000227- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
228 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000229 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
230 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
231 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000232
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000233- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
234 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
235 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
236 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
237
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000238- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
239 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
240 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
241 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
242 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
243 #897625.
244
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000245- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
246 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
247
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000248- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
249 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
250 and pops on either side of the deque.
251
252- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
253 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
254
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000255- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
256 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
257 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
258 other functions that expect a function argument.
259
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000260- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
261
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000262- os.getsid was added.
263
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000264- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
265 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
266 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
267
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000268- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
269
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000270- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
271
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000272- readline.clear_history was added.
273
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000274- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
275
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000276- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
277
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000278- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
279
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000280- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
281
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000282- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
283
284- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
285
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000286- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
287
288- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
289
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000290- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
291 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
292 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
293
294- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
295 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
296 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
297 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
298 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
299 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
300 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
301
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000302- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
303 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
304 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
305 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000306
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000307- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
308 iterators from a single iterable.
309
310- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
311 of raising a TypeError exception.
312
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000313- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
314 as parameter.
315
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000316Library
317-------
318
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000319- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
320 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
321 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
322
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000323- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
324 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
325 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
326
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000327- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
328
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000329- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
330
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000331- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
332 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
333
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000334- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
335 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
336 type pattern with the same value exists.
337
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000338- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
339 when run from the command prompt).
340
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000341- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
342 not taken into consideration when caching value.
343
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000344- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
345 default sort).
346
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000347- Added global runctx function to profile module
348
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000349- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
350
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000351- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
352
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000353- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
354
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000355- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
356 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
357 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
358 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
359 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
360 accordingly.
361
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000362- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
363 decoding standards.
364
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000365- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
366 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
367 called for all requests.
368
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000369- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
370 they are passed to the compiler.
371
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000372- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
373 indent, width and depth.
374
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000375- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
376 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
377
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000378- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
379 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
380
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000381- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
382
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000383- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
384
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000385- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
386
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000387- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
388 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
389
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000390- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
391 for better performance
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000392
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000393- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
394 a string).
395
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000396- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
397
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000398- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
399
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000400- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
401
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000402- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
403
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000404- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
405 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
406 list of fieldnames.
407
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000408- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
409 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
410
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000411- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
412
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000413- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
414 empty lists.
415
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000416- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
417 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
418 and shelves.
419
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000420- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
421 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
422
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000423- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000424 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
425 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000426
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000427- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
428 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000429 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000430
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000431- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000432 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
433 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
434
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000435- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
436 and removed in Py2.4.
437
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000438- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
439
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000440- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
441
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000442Tools/Demos
443-----------
444
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000445- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
446 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
447
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000448- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
449
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000450- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
451 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
452 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
453 destination in situations where both files are given.
454
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000455- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
456 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
457 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
458 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
459
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000460- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
461
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000462- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
463 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
464 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
465 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
466 now.
467
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000468- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
469 in effect
470
471- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
472 C-c C-h
473
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000474- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
475 -d option was given.
476
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000477Build
478-----
479
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000480- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
481 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
482
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000483- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
484 removed.
485
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000486- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
487 supported (see PEP 11).
488
489- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
490
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000491- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
492
493- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
494 (see PEP 11).
495
496- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
497 sizeof(char) must be 1.
498
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000499C API
500-----
501
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000502- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
503 generator objects.
504
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000505- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
506 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000507 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
508 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000509
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000510- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
511 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
512
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000513- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
514 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
515 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
516 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
517 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
518
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000519- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
520 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
521 about 10% faster.
522
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000523- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
524 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
525
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000526- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
527 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
528 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
529 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
530
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000531New platforms
532-------------
533
534Tests
535-----
536
537Windows
538-------
539
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000540- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
541 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
542 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
543 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
544
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000545- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
546 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
547 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
548
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000549Mac
550----
551
552
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000553What's New in Python 2.3 final?
554===============================
555
556*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
557
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000558IDLE
559----
560
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000561- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
562 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
563 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
564 context-menu actions.
565
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000566- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
567 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
568 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
569 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
570 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
571 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
572 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
573 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
574 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
575
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000576
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000577What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
578=============================================
579
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000580*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000581
582Core and builtins
583-----------------
584
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000585- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000586 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000587 comment at the end are still unsupported.
588
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000589Extension modules
590-----------------
591
592- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
593 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
594 than once. This has been fixed.
595
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000596- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
597 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
598 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
599 call.
600
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000601- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
602
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000603Library
604-------
605
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000606- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
607 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
608
609- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
610 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
611 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
612 restored.
613
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000614IDLE
615----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000616
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000617- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000618
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000619Build
620-----
621
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000622- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
623 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
624
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000625C API
626-----
627
628Windows
629-------
630
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000631- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
632 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
633
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000634- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
635
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000636Mac
637---
638
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000639- Various fixes to pimp.
640
641- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
642
643- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
644 more problems than it solves.
645
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000646
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000647What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
648=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000649
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000650*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
651
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000652Core and builtins
653-----------------
654
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000655- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
656 by sys.setcheckinterval().
657
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000658- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
659 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000660 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000661
662- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
663 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
664 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000665 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000666
667- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
668 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000669
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000670- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
671 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
672 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
673
674- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000675 770247.
676
677- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000678
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000679Extension modules
680-----------------
681
682- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
683 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
684
685- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
686
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000687- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
688
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000689- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
690 contained within the _strptime module.
691
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000692- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
693 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
694
695- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000696 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
697
698- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
699 the find_class attribute, if present.
700
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000701- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000702
703 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
704 (SF bug 763298).
705
706 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000707 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
708 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
709 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000710
711 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
712
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000713Library
714-------
715
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000716- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
717
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000718- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
719 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
720 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
721 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
722 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
723 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
724 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
725 or Tester().
726
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000727- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
728 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
729 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
730 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
731 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
732 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
733 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
734 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
735 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000736
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000737 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000738
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000739- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
740 weren't before was an oversight.
741
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000742- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
743 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
744
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000745- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
746 when there are no lines.
747
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000748- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
749 which could occur with Tk 8.4
750
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000751- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
752 to child processes.
753
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000754- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
755
756- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
757
758- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
759 xmlrpclib.
760
761- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
762 responses.
763
764- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
765 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
766
767- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
768 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
769 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
770
771- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
772 used as patterns.
773
774- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
775 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
776 than Tk 8.3.
777
778- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
779
780- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000781
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000782Tools/Demos
783-----------
784
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000785- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
786
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000787- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
788
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000789- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000790
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000791Build
792-----
793
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000794- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
795
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000796- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
797
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000798- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
799 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000800
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000801- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
802 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
803 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000804
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000805C API
806-----
807
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000808- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
809 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
810
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000811Windows
812-------
813
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000814- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
815 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
816 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
817 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
818 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
819 Python exception ::
820
821 thread.error: can't start new thread
822
823 is raised now.
824
825- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
826 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
827 instead of from DLL teardown.
828
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000829Mac
830---
831
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000832- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000833 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000834 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
835 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
836 the executable in the bundle.
837
838- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000839
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000840- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
841
842- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
843 on Panther.
844
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000845What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
846================================
847
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000848*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000849
850Core and builtins
851-----------------
852
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000853- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
854 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
855 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
856 with the -i option.
857
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000858- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
859 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
860
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000861- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
862 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
863
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000864- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
865 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
866 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
867 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
868 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
869 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
870 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
871 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
872 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
873 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
874 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
875 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
876 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000877
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000878- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
879 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
880 embedded in a lambda expression.
881
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000882- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
883 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
884 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
885 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
886 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
887
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000888- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
889 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
890 matches the restriction on classic classes.
891
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000892- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
893 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
894
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000895- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
896 It's writable again.
897
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000898- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
899 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
900 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000901 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000902
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000903- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
904 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
905 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
906
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000907Extension modules
908-----------------
909
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000910- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
911 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
912
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000913- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
914 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
915 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
916 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
917
918- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
919 collection.
920
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000921- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
922 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
923 unique within a single program run.
924
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000925- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
926 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
927
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000928- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
929 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
930
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000931- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
932 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000933
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000934- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
935
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000936- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
937 Fixes SF bug #730685.
938
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000939- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
940 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
941 for many BSD-derived systems.
942
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000943
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000944Library
945-------
946
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000947- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
948 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
949 primary ones:
950
951 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
952 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
953 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
954
955 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
956 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
957 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
958 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
959 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
960 framework features (which doctest lacks).
961
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000962- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
963 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
964 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
965 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
966 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
967 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
968 argument.
969
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000970- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
971 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
972 in the archive.
973
974- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
975 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
976
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000977- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
978 569574).
979
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000980- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
981 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
982 no more.
983
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000984- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
985 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
986 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
987 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
988 code coverage.
989
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000990- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
991 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
992 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000993 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
994 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000995
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000996- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
997 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
998 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000999 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001000
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001001- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1002
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001003- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1004 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1005 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1006 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1007
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001008- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1009 handling.
1010
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001011- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1012 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1013
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001014- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1015 in socket.py.
1016
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001017- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1018
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001019- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1020 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1021 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1022 opener with proxy support.
1023
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001024- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1025
1026- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1027
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001028Tools/Demos
1029-----------
1030
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001031- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1032
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001033- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1034
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001035- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1036 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001037
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001038- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1039 files.
1040
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001041Build
1042-----
1043
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001044- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001045 different root directory.
1046
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001047C API
1048-----
1049
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001050- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1051 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1052 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1053 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1054 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1055 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1056 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1057 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1058 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1059 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1060
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001061- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1062 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1063 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1064 from Python.
1065
1066
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001067New platforms
1068-------------
1069
1070None this time.
1071
1072Tests
1073-----
1074
1075- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1076 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1077
1078Windows
1079-------
1080
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001081- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1082
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001083- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1084 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1085 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1086 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1087 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1088 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1089 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1090 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1091 that's what it's for.
1092
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001093Mac
1094---
1095
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001096- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1097 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1098 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1099 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001100- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1101 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1102- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001103
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001104SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1105------------------------------------
1106
1107430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1108598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1109622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1110661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1111683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1112697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1113713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1114724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1115727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1116729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1117730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1118731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1119732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1120733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1121735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1122740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1123744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1124745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1125747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1126749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1127751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1128753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1129755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1130757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1131760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1132
1133
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001134What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1135================================
1136
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001137*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001138
1139Core and builtins
1140-----------------
1141
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001142- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1143 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1144
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001145- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1146 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1147 and cannot be strings).
1148
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001149- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1150 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1151 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1152 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1153
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001154- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1155 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1156 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1157 Python itself.
1158
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001159- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1160 the referenced object, if it has one.
1161
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001162- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1163 the thread started at
1164 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1165
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001166- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1167 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1168 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1169 placed on a list index.
1170
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001171- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1172 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1173 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1174 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1175
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001176- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1177 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1178 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1179 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1180 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1181 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1182 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1183
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001184- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1185 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1186 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1187 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1188 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1189
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001190- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1191 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001192
1193- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1194 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1195 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1196 #693195.)
1197
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001198- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1199 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001200
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001201- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001202 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001203 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1204 interpreter executions, would fail.
1205
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001206- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001207 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001208 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001209
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001210Extension modules
1211-----------------
1212
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001213- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1214 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1215 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1216 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1217
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001218- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1219 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1220
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001221- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1222 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1223 and Greg Chapman.)
1224
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001225- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1226 recursively.
1227
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001228- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001229 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1230 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1231 leaks.
1232
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001233- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1234
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001235- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1236 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1237 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1238 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1239 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1240 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1241 #705836.
1242
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001243- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001244 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1245
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001246- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1247 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1248 See SF bug #692416.
1249
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001250- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1251 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1252
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001253- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1254 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1255 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001256
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001257- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001258 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1259 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1260
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001261- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1262 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1263 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1264 timeouts to work properly.
1265
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001266Library
1267-------
1268
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001269- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1270 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1271 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1272 future release.
1273
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001274- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1275 for querying platform dependent features.
1276
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001277- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001278
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001279- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1280 pickle protocol versions.
1281
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001282- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1283 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1284 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1285
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001286- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1287
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001288- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1289 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1290 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1291 modules.
1292
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001293- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1294 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1295 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1296
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001297- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1298 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1299
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001300- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1301 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1302 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1303
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001304- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001305 MS Office extensions.
1306
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001307- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1308 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1309
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001310- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1311 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1312
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001313- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1314 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1315 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1316 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1317 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1318 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1319
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001320- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1321 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1322 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001323
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001324- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1325 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1326 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1327
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001328- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1329
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001330- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1331 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1332 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1333
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001334Tools/Demos
1335-----------
1336
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001337- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1338 See the module docstring for details.
1339
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001340Build
1341-----
1342
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001343- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1344 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001345
1346C API
1347-----
1348
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001349- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1350
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001351- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1352 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1353 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1354
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001355- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1356 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001357
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001358 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1359 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1360 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001361
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001362- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001363 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1364
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001365- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1366 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1367 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001368
1369New platforms
1370-------------
1371
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001372None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001373
1374Tests
1375-----
1376
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001377- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1378 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001379
1380Windows
1381-------
1382
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001383- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1384 function.
1385
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001386- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1387 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001388
1389Mac
1390---
1391
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001392- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1393 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001394
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001395- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1396 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001397
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001398- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1399 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1400 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001401
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001402- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001403 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1404 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001405
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001406- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1407 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001408
1409
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001410What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1411=================================
1412
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001413*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001414
1415Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001416-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001417
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001418- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1419 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1420 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1421
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001422- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1423 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1424 (SF patch #664376.)
1425
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001426- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1427 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1428 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1429 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1430 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1431 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001432 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001433
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001434- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1435 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1436 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1437 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001438 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001439
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001440- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1441 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1442 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1443 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1444 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1445 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1446 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1447 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1448 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1449 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1450 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1451
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001452- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1453 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1454 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1455 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1456 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1457 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1458
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001459- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1460 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1461
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001462- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1463 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1464 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1465 case.)
1466
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001467- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1468 passed as unicode strings.
1469
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001470- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1471 See SF bug #683467.
1472
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001473- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1474 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1475
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001476- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1477
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001478- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1479
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001480- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1481 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1482 arguments.
1483
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001484- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1485 See SF bug #667147.
1486
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001487- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001488 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001489 See SF bug #676155.
1490
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001491- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001492 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001493 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1494 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1495 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1496 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1497 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1498 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001499
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001500Extension modules
1501-----------------
1502
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001503- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1504 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1505 tp_as_number pointer.
1506
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001507- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1508 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1509 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1510 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1511 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1512
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001513- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1514
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001515- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1516
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001517- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001518 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001519 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1520 patch #678531.)
1521
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001522- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1523 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1524
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001525- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1526 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1527
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001528- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1529
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001530- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1531 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1532 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1533
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001534- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1535
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001536- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1537 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1538
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001539- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001540
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001541- datetime changes:
1542
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001543 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1544
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001545 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1546 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1547 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1548 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1549 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1550 now.
1551
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001552 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001553 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1554 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001555
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001556 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001557 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001558 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1559 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1560 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1561 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001562
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001563 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1564 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1565 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001566 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1567
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001568 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1569 by a later example coded by Guido.
1570
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001571 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001572 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1573 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1574 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001575 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1576 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1577
1578 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1579 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1580 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1581 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1582 tzinfo subclass instance.
1583
1584 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1585 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1586 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1587 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1588 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1589 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1590 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1591 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001592
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001593 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1594 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1595 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1596 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1597 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001598 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1599
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001600 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001601
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001602 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1603 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1604 as a naive datetime object.
1605
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001606 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1607 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1608 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1609
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001610 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1611 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1612 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1613 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1614 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1615 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1616 comparison.
1617
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001618 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1619 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1620 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1621 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001622 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001623
1624 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001625
1626 and ::
1627
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001628 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1629
1630 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1631 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1632 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1633 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1634
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001635 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1636 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1637 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1638 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1639 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1640
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001641 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1642 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001643 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1644 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001645
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001646Library
1647-------
1648
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001649- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1650 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1651
1652- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1653 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1654 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1655 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1656 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1657 See PEP 307 for details.
1658
1659- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1660 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1661
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001662- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1663 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001664 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001665 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1666 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001667 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001668
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001669- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1670 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1671
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001672- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1673 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1674 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1675
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001676- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1677
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001678- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1679 exception.
1680
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001681- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1682 class.
1683
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001684- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1685 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1686 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1687
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001688- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1689 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1690
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001691- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001692 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1693 See SF bug #659228.
1694
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001695- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1696 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1697 See SF patch #651082.
1698
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001699- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001700
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001701- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1702 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1703
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001704- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001705 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001706
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001707- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1708 DOS paths from other platforms.
1709
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001710Tools/Demos
1711-----------
1712
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001713- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1714 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1715 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1716 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1717 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1718 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1719 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1720 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1721 example:
1722
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001723 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1724 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001725
1726 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1727
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001728
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001729Build
1730-----
1731
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001732- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1733 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1734 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001735 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1736
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001737 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1738
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001739- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1740 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1741 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1742 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1743 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1744 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1745 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1746 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1747 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1748
1749- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1750 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1751 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1752 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1753
1754- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1755 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1756
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001757C API
1758-----
1759
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001760- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1761 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001762
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001763- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1764 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1765 tp_as_number pointer.
1766
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001767- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1768 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1769 (SF #681367)
1770
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001771- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1772 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1773 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1774 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001775
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001776Tests
1777-----
1778
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001779- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001780 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1781 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1782 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1783 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1784 pydoc.)
1785
1786- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1787
1788- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001789
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001790Windows
1791-------
1792
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001793- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1794 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1795 time).
1796
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001797- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1798 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1799
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001800- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1801 release without strong cryptography.
1802
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001803- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001804 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001805
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001806- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1807 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1808
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001809Mac
1810---
1811
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001812- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1813 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001814
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001815- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1816 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1817 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001818
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001819- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1820 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001821
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001822- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1823 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1824 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1825 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001826
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001827- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001828 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1829 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1830 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001831
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001832
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001833What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001834=================================
1835
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001836*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001837
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001838Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001839--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001840
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001841- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1842
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001843- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1844 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001845 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001846 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001847 a different meaning than before.
1848
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001849- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001850 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001851 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001852
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001853- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001854 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001855 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001856
1857- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1858 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1859 and deallocation.
1860
1861- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1862 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1863
1864- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1865 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1866 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1867 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1868 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1869
1870- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1871 now detected by the garbage collector.
1872
1873- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1874 [SF bug 519621]
1875
1876- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1877 identifier.
1878
1879- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1880 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1881 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1882 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1883 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1884 [SF bug 563060]
1885
1886- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1887 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1888 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1889 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1890 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1891
1892- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1893 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1894 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1895
1896- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1897
1898- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1899 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1900 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1901 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1902 state of the slots would be lost.)
1903
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001904Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001905-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001906
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001907- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001908 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1909 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1910 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1911 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001912 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1913 Jython 2.1.
1914
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001915- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001916 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001917 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1918 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1919 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1920 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1921 these, see PEP 302.
1922
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001923- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1924 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1925 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1926
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001927- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1928 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1929 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1930
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001931- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1932 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1933 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1934
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001935- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1936 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1937 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1938 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1939 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1940 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1941 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1942 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1943 releases or implementations.
1944
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001945- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001946 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1947 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001948
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001949- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1950 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1951
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001952- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1953 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1954 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1955
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001956- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1957 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1958
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001959- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1960 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001961 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1962 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001963
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001964- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1965 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1966 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1967 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1968 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1969
1970 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1971 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1972 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1973 pattern.
1974
1975 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1976 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1977 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1978 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1979
1980 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1981 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1982 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1983 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1984 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1985 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1986
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001987- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1988 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1989 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1990 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1991 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1992 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1993 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1994 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001995
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001996- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1997 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1998 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1999 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2000 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002001 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2002 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2003 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2004 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2005 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2006 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2007 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002008
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002009- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2010 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2011
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002012- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2013 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2014 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2015 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2016 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2017 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2018 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2019 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2020 to Zack Weinberg!
2021
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002022- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2023 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2024 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2025 type. This has been fixed now.
2026
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002027- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2028 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2029 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2030
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002031- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2032 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2033 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2034 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2035 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2036 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2037 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2038 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002039 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002040
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002041- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2042 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2043 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002044
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002045- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2046 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2047 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2048 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2049 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2050 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2051 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2052 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002053 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002054 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2055 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2056
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002057- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2058 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2059 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2060 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2061 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2062 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2063 this.)
2064
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002065- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2066 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002067 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002068 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002069 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2070 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002071 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2072 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002073
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002074- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2075 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2076 currently running.
2077
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002078- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2079 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2080 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2081 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2082
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002083- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2084 as directory names.
2085
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002086- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2087 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2088
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002089- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2090 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2091
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002092- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002093 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2094 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002095
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002096- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2097 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2098 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2099 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2100 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2101
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002102- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2103 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2104 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2105 removed.
2106
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002107- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2108 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2109 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2110
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002111- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2112 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2113 to __debug__.
2114
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002115- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2116 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2117 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2118
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002119- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2120 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2121 deprecated now.
2122
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002123- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2124 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2125 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002126
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002127- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2128 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2129 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2130 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2131 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002132
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002133- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2134 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2135
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002136- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2137 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2138 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002139 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002140 is backward compatible.
2141
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002142- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2143 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2144 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2145 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2146 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2147
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002148- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2149 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2150 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2151 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2152 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2153 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002154
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002155- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2156 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2157
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002158- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2159 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2160
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002161- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2162 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2163 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2164 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2165 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2166
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002167- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2168 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2169 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2170
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002171- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002172 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2173
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002174- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2175 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2176 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002177
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002178- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2179 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2180
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002181- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2182 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2183 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2184
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002185- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2186
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002187Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002188-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002189
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002190- Added three operators to the operator module:
2191 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2192 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2193 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2194
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002195- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2196
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002197- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2198 archives.
2199
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002200- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2201 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2202 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2203
2204 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2205
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002206- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2207 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2208 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002209 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002210
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002211- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2212 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2213 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2214 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002215 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2216 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2217 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2218 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002219
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002220- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2221 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002222
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002223- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2224
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002225- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2226 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2227
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002228- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2229 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2230 supported.
2231
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002232- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2233
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002234- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2235 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002236
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002237- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2238 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2239
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002240- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2241
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002242- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2243 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2244
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002245- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2246 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2247 functions but callable type objects.
2248
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002249- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002250 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002251 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002252
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002253- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2254 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002255
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002256- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2257 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002258
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002259- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2260 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2261 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2262 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2263
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002264- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2265 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002266
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002267- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2268 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2269 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2270 and __imul__.
2271
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002272- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002273 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2274 is called.
2275
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002276- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2277 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2278 interpreter was compiled.
2279
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002280- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2281 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2282 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002283 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002284 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2285 1, not 2.
2286
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002287- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2288 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2289 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2290 limit.
2291
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002292- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2293 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2294 bug #623464.
2295
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002296- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2297 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2298 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2299 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2300
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002301Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002302-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002303
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002304- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2305
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002306- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2307 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2308 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2309 with Python 2.3a2.
2310
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002311- os.path exposes getctime.
2312
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002313- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002314 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002315 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002316 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002317 unit tests of floating point results.
2318
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002319- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2320 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2321 has been increased.
2322
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002323- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2324 executed.
2325
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002326- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2327 postinstallation script.
2328
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002329- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2330 test the current module.
2331
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002332- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002333 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2334 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2335 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2336 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2337
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002338- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002339 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002340 Ward's Optik package.
2341
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002342- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2343 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2344 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2345 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2346
2347- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2348 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002349 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002350
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002351- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2352 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2353 shelf are binary pickles.
2354
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002355- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2356 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2357
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002358- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2359 modules are iterators now.
2360
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002361- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2362 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2363 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2364 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2365 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2366 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002367
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002368- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2369 with their entity value.
2370
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002371- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2372
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002373- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2374 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002375
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002376- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2377 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002378 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002379
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002380- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2381 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2382 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2383 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2384 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2385 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2386 main():
2387
2388 import locale
2389 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2390
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002391- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2392 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2393
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002394- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2395 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2396 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2397 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2398 to the new standard.
2399
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002400- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2401 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2402 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2403 an extension to the database.
2404
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002405- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2406 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2407 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2408 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002409 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002410
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002411- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002412 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002413
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002414- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2415 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2416 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2417 bounded integers.
2418
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002419- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2420 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2421 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2422 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2423 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2424 in existence.
2425
2426 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2427 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2428 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2429 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2430 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2431 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2432
2433 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2434 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2435 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2436 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2437
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002438- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2439 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2440 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2441
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002442- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2443
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002444- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2445 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2446 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2447 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2448
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002449- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2450 argument.
2451
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002452- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2453 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2454 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2455 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2456 [SF patch 560794].
2457
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002458- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2459 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2460 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002461 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2462 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2463 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002464
2465- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2466 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002467
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002468- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2469 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2470 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2471 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002472
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002473- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2474 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2475 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2476 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2477 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2478
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002479- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002480
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002481- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2482
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002483- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2484 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2485 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2486 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2487 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2488 identical to None.
2489
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002490- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2491 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2492 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2493 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2494 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2495 results now.
2496
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002497- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2498 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2499
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002500- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2501 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2502 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2503 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2504 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2505 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2506 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2507 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2508
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002509- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2510
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002511- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2512 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2513
2514- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2515 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2516 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2517 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2518 and other systems.
2519
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002520- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2521 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2522 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2523 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 +00002524 work well with these.
2525
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002526- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2527
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002528- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002529 connections.
2530
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002531- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2532 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2533 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2534
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002535- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2536 sets
2537
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002538- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2539 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2540 name.
2541
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002542- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2543 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2544 passed in.
2545
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002546- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002547 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002548 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2549 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002550
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002551- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2552
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002553- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2554
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002555- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2556 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2557 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2558
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002559- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2560 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2561 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2562 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002563 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002564
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002565- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002566 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002567 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002568
2569- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2570 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2571 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2572
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002573- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002574 the value of its expression argument.
2575
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002576- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2577 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2578 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2579
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002580- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2581 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2582 skipstone browser was included.
2583
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002584- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2585 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2586
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002587Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002588-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002589
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002590- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2591 names in addition to accepting file names.
2592
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002593- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2594 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2595 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2596 still used and useful.)
2597
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002598- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2599 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2600 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2601 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002602
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002603- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2604 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2605 the generated binary.
2606
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002607Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002608-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002609
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002610- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2611
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002612- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2613 except in the hands of experts.
2614
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002615- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002616 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2617 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2618 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002619
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002620- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2621 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2622 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2623 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2624 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2625 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2626 builds.
2627
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002628- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2629 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2630 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2631 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2632 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2633 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2634 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2635 new type.
2636
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002637- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002638
2639 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2640 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2641 positive infinities.
2642
2643 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2644 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2645 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2646 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2647 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2648 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2649 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2650
2651 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2652
2653 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2654
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002655- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2656 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2657 size of the executable.
2658
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002659- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2660 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2661 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2662 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002663
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002664- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2665
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002666- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2667 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2668 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002669
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002670- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2671 well as Unix.
2672
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002673- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2674 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2675 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2676 modules in the README file for details.
2677
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002678C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002679-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002680
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002681- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2682 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002683 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002684 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002685 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002686
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002687- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2688 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2689 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2690 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2691 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2692 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002693 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002694 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2695 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2696 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2697 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2698 aligned.)
2699
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002700- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2701 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2702 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2703
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002704- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2705 level.
2706
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002707- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2708 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2709 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2710 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2711 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2712
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002713- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2714 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2715 code.
2716
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002717- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2718 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2719 adjusting for negative indices.
2720
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002721- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2722 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2723 object.
2724
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002725- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2726 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2727 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2728
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002729- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2730 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002731
2732- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2733
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002734- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2735 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2736 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2737 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2738
2739- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2740
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002741- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002742
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002743- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002744 without going through the buffer API.
2745
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002746- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002747
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002748- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2749 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2750 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2751 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2752
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002753- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2754 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2755
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002756- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002757 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2758
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002759New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002760-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002761
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002762- OpenVMS is now supported.
2763
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002764- AtheOS is now supported.
2765
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002766- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2767
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002768- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2769
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002770Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002771-----
2772
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002773- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2774 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2775 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002776
2777Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002778-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002779
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002780- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2781 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2782 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2783 bugs.
2784 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002785 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002786 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2787 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002788 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002789
2790- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002791 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002792
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002793- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2794 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2795
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002796- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2797 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002798 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002799 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2800
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002801- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2802 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2803 use files" uninstall option).
2804
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002805- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2806
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002807- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2808 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2809
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002810- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2811 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2812 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2813
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002814- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2815 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2816 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2817 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2818 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002819 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2820 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2821 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002822
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002823- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002824 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002825 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2826 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2827 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2828 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2829 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2830 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2831 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2832 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2833 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2834 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2835 work around.
2836
2837- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2838 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2839 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2840 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2841 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2842 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2843 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2844 specified with O_CREAT too).
2845
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002846Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002847----
2848
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002849- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002850
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002851- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2852 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2853 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2854
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002855- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2856 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2857 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2858
2859- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2860 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2861 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2862 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2863 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2864 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2865 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2866 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002867
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002868- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2869 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2870 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002871
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002872- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2873 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2874 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2875 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2876 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002877
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002878- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2879 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2880 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002881
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002882- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2883 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002884
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002885- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2886 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2887 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2888 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2889 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002890
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002891- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2892 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2893 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2894
2895- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2896 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2897 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002898
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002899- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2900 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2901 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2902 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002903 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002904
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002905- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2906 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002907
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002908- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2909 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002910
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002911- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002912 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002913 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2914 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002915
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002916
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002917What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002918===============================
2919
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002920*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2921
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002922Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002923--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002924
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002925- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2926 with a custom metaclass.
2927
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002928Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002929-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002930
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002931- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2932 are proxies.
2933
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002934Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002935-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002936
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002937- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2938 very short strings.
2939
2940- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2941 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2942 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2943 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2944 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2945
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002946Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002947-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002948
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002949- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2950 close or delete time).
2951
2952- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2953 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2954
2955- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2956
2957- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002958 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002959
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002960Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002961-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002962
2963Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002964-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002965
2966C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002967-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002968
2969New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002970-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002971
2972Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002973-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002974
2975Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002976-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002977
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002978- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2979
2980- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2981 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2982
2983- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2984 deleted at process exit time.
2985
2986- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2987 in backslash.
2988
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002989Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002990----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002991
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002992- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2993 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2994 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2995
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002996
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002997What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002998===========================
2999
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003000*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3001
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003002Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003003--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003004
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003005- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3006 been extensively updated. See
3007
3008 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3009
3010 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3011
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003012- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3013 deleted!
3014
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003015- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3016 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3017 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3018 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3019 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3020
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003021- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3022
3023 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3024 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3025
3026 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3027 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3028 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3029 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3030 supported anyway.
3031
3032 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3033 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3034
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003035- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3036 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3037 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3038 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3039 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003040
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003041- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3042 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3043 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3044
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003045Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003046-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003047
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003048- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3049 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3050 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3051 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3052 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3053 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003054 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3055 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3056 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3057 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003058
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003059- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3060 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3061 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3062
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003063Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003064-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003065
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003066- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3067
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003068Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003069-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003070
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003071- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3072 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3073 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3074 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3075 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3076 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3077
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003078- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3079
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003080- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3081
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003082- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3083
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003084- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3085 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3086 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3087
3088- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3089
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003090Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003091-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003092
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003093- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3094 off a search on Google.
3095
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003096Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003097-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003098
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003099- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3100 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3101 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3102 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3103 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3104 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3105 other platforms should do likewise.
3106
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003107- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3108 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3109 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3110
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003111C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003112-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003113
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003114- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3115 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3116 producing key-value pairs.
3117
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003118- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003119 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003120 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3121 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3122 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3123 previously went unchallenged.
3124
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003125New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003126-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003127
3128Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003129-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003130
3131Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003132-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003133
3134Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003135----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003136
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003137- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3138 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003139
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003140- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3141 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3142 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3143 home.
3144
3145
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003146What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003147===========================
3148
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003149*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3150
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003151Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003152--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003153
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003154- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3155 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003156
3157 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003158 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003159
3160 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3161 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003162 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003163 This needs to be documented.
3164
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003165- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3166 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3167
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003168- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3169 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3170 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3171
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003172- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3173 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3174
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003175- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3176 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3177 class forbids it).
3178
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003179- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3180 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3181 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3182
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003183- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3184
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003185Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003186-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003187
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003188- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3189 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003190 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003191
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003192- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3193 (like 1 + '').
3194
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003195Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003196-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003197
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003198- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3199 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3200 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3201 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003202 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003203 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3204
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003205- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3206 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3207 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3208 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3209
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003210- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3211 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003212 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3213 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3214 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003215
3216- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3217 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003218
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003219- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3220 bytes on its input.
3221
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003222Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003223-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003224
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003225- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003226 convenience function.
3227
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003228- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3229 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3230 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003231 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3232 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3233 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3234 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3235 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3236 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003237
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003238- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3239 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3240 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3241 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3242
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003243- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3244 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3245 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3246
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003247- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3248 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3249 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3250 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3251
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003252- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3253 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003254 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003255 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3256 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3257 new -l and -e options.
3258
3259- statcache is now deprecated.
3260
3261- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3262 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003263 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003264 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3265 time properly taken into account.
3266
3267- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3268 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3269 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3270 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3271
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003272Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003273-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003274
3275Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003276-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003277
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003278- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3279 is built with libdb3 if available.
3280
3281- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3282
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003283C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003284-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003285
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003286- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3287 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3288 PySequence_Size().
3289
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003290- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3291
3292- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3293 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3294 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3295
3296- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3297 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3298
3299- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3300 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3301
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003302New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003303-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003304
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003305- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3306 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3307
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003308- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3309 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3310
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003311- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3312
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003313Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003314-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003315
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003316- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3317 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3318
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003319Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003320-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003321
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003322Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003323----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003324
3325- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3326 removed completely in the next release.
3327
3328- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3329 OSX.
3330
3331- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3332 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3333
3334- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3335
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003336
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003337What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003338===========================
3339
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003340*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3341
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003342Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003343--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003344
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003345- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003346 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003347 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003348 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3349 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003350 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3351 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003352 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3353 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003354
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003355- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3356 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3357
3358- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3359 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3360
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003361Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003362-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003363
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003364- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3365 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3366 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3367 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3368 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3369 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3370 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3371 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3372
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003373- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3374 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3375 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3376 example).
3377
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003378- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003379 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003380 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003381 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003382
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003383- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3384 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3385 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003386 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003387
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003388- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3389 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3390 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3391 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3392 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3393 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3394
3395 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3396
3397 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3398
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003399Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003400-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003401
3402- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3403
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003404- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3405
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003406- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3407 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003408
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003409- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3410 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3411 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3412 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3413 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3414 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003415 attributes.
3416
3417- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3418 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3419 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003420
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003421- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3422 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3423 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003424
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003425- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3426 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3427 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003428 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3429 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3430
3431- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3432 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003433
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003434Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003435-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003436
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003437- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3438 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3439
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003440- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3441 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3442 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3443 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3444
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003445- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3446 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3447 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3448 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3449
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003450 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3451 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3452 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3453 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3454 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3455 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3456 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3457 without losing information).
3458
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003459- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003460 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3461 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3462 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3463 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3464 module).
3465
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003466 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003467 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3468 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3469 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3470 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003471
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003472- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003473 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3474 encoding.
3475
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003476- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3477 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3478
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003479- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003480 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3481
3482- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3483 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3484 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3485 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3486
3487- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3488
3489- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3490 ON, and OFF.
3491
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003492- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3493 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3494
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003495Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003496-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003497
3498- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3499 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3500 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003501
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003502- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3503 been added: -X and -E.
3504
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003505Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003506-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003507
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003508- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3509 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3510
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003511C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003512-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003513
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003514- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3515 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3516 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3517 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3518 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3519
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003520- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3521 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3522 as long) arguments.
3523
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003524- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3525 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3526 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3527 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3528 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3529 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3530
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003531- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3532 input.
3533
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003534New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003535-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003536
3537Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003538-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003539
3540Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003541-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003542
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003543- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3544 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3545 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3546
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003547- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3548 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3549 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003550 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003551
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003552 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3553 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3554 import signal
3555 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003556
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003557 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003558 while 1:
3559 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003560 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003561 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3562 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3563 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3564 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003565
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003566
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003567What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3568===========================
3569
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003570*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3571
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003572Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003573--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003574
3575- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3576 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3577 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3578
3579- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3580 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3581 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3582 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3583 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3584 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3585 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003586
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003587- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003588 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003589 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3590 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3591 associate a docstring with a property.
3592
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003593- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3594 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3595 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3596 other built-in object types.
3597
3598- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3599 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3600 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3601 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3602 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3603
3604- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3605 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3606
3607- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3608 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003609 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003610 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3611 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3612 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3613 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3614 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3615
3616- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3617 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3618 class.
3619
3620- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3621 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3622 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3623 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3624
3625- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3626 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3627 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3628 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3629
3630- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3631 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3632
3633- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3634 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3635 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3636 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3637 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003638 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003639 with the same value as s.
3640
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003641- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3642
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003643Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003644----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003645
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003646- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3647
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003648- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3649 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3650 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3651 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3652 objects.
3653
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003654- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3655 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003656 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3657 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3658
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003659- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3660 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3661 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3662
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003663Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003664-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003665
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003666- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3667 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3668 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3669 by the instances.
3670
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003671- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3672 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3673 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3674
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003675- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3676 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3677 before the entire comparison is complete.
3678
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003679- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3680 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3681 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3682
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003683- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3684 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3685 getwriter().
3686
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003687- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3688 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3689
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003690- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003691 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3692 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3693
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003694- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3695 iterable object.
3696
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003697- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3698 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003699
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003700- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3701 authentication.
3702
3703- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3704 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003705
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003706- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003707 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3708 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3709 a sample driver.)
3710
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003711Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003712-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003713
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003714- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3715 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3716 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3717 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3718 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3719 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3720 kernel has large file support.
3721
3722- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3723 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3724 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3725 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3726 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3727
3728- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3729 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3730 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3731
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003732C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003733-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003734
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003735- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3736 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3737
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003738New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003739-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003740
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003741- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3742 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3743
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003744Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003745-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003746
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003747- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3748 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3749 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3750 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3751 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3752
3753- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3754 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3755 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3756 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3757
3758- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3759 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3760
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003761Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003762-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003763
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003764- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003765 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3766 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003767
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003768
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003769What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3770===========================
3771
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003772*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3773
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003774Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003775----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003776
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003777- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3778 big to represent as a C double.
3779
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003780- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3781 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3782 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3783 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3784 restriction).
3785
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003786- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3787 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3788 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3789 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3790 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3791
3792 >>> dir([])
3793 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3794 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3795 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3796 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3797 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3798 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3799 'reverse', 'sort']
3800
3801 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3802
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003803- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003804 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3805 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3806 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3807 OverflowError exception.
3808
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003809- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003810 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003811 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3812 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3813 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3814 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3815 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003816 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003817 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3818 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3819
3820 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3821 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3822 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3823 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003824
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003825- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003826 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3827 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3828 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3829 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3830 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3831 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3832 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3833 once it is created.
3834
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003835- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3836 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3837 (key, value) pairs.
3838
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003839- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003840 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3841 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3842
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003843- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3844 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3845 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3846 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3847 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003848
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003849- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003850 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3851 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3852
3853 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3854
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003855- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003856 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3857
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003858Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003859-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003860
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003861- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003862 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3863 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003864
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003865- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3866 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3867 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3868 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3869 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3870 in this area anymore).
3871
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003872- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3873 threading.Timer.
3874
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003875- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3876 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3877
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003878- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003879 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3880
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003881- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003882 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3883 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3884 converted to Python longs.
3885
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003886- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003887 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3888
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003889- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3890 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3891 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3892
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003893Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003894-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003895
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003896- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3897 division operators as per PEP 238.
3898
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003899Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003900-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003901
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003902- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3903 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3904 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3905 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3906
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003907C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003908-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003909
3910- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003911
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003912- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3913 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003914 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003915
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003916 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3917 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003918 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003919 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003920
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003921- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003922 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3923 module:
3924
3925 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003926
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003927 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3928 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003929
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003930 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3931 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003932
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003933 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3934
3935 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3936
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003937- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003938 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3939 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3940 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003941
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003942New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003943-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003944
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003945- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3946 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3947 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3948 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3949 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003950
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003951Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003952-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003953
3954Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003955-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003956
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003957- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3958 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3959 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3960 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003961 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3962 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3963 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3964 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3965 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003966
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003967- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003968 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3969
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003970
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003971What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3972===========================
3973
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003974*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3975
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003976Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003977-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003978
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003979- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3980 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3981
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003982- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3983 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3984 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003985
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003986- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3987 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3988 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3989 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003990
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003991- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3992
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003993- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003994
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003995Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003996-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003997
3998- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003999 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004000 the module docstring for details.
4001
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004002Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004003-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004004
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004005- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004006 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4007 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4008 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004009
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004010- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4011 Nick Mathewson.
4012
4013Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004014----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004015
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004016- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4017 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4018 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4019 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4020 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4021 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4022 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4023 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4024
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004025- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4026 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4027 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4028 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4029
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004030- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4031 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4032 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4033 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4034 come a long way).
4035
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004036- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4037 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4038 write filters for these warnings).
4039
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004040- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4041 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4042 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4043 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4044 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4045
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004046- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4047 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4048 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4049 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4050 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4051 older distribution.
4052
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004053Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004054-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004055
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004056- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4057 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004058 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004059
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004060- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4061 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4062 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4063
4064- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4065
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004066- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4067
4068- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4069
4070- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4071
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004072- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004073
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004074- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4075
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004076New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004077-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004078
4079C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004080-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004081
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004082- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4083 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4084 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4085 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4086 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4087 against buffer overruns.
4088
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004089- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004090 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4091 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004092 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4093 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4094 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4095
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004096- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4097 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4098 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4099 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4100 deprecated.
4101
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004102Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004103-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004104
4105- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4106 relevant is found.
4107
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004108
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004109What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004110===========================
4111
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004112*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4113
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004114Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004115----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004116
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004117- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4118 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4119 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4120 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4121 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4122 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4123 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4124 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004125 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004126 repaired.
4127
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004128- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004129 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004130 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4131 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4132 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4133 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4134 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4135 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4136 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4137 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4138
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004139- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4140 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4141 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4142 leading BMO character).
4143
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004144- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4145 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4146 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4147
4148 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4149 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4150 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004151
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004152 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4153 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4154 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4155 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4156 for various simple to use conversions.
4157
4158 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4159 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4160
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004161 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4162 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4163 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4164 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4165 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4166 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4167 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4168 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4169 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4170 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4171 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4172 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4173 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4174 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4175 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004176
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004177- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4178 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4179 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004180 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004181 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004182
4183 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004184 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4185 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4186 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4187 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4188 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004189 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4190 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004191
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004192 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4193 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4194 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004195 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004196
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004197- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4198 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4199 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4200 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4201 floating arithmetic,
4202
4203 x = 9007199254740992.0
4204 print long(x)
4205
4206 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4207 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4208 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4209 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4210 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4211 functions are of good quality).
4212
4213 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4214 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4215 algorithms to break.
4216
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004217- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4218 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4219 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4220 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4221 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4222 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4223 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4224 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4225 order.
4226
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004227- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4228 operation along the most common code paths.
4229
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004230- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4231 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4232
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004233- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4234 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4235 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4236 {}.update(UserDict())
4237
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004238- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4239 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4240 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4241 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4242 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4243 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4244 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4245 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4246
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004247- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004248 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004249
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004250 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004251 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4252 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004253 join() method of strings
4254 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004255 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4256 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004257 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004258 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004259
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004260- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4261 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4262
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004263- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4264 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4265
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004266- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4267 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4268 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4269 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4270
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004271- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4272 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004273 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004274 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4275 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004276
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004277- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4278
4279
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004280Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004281-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004282
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004283- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004284 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004285 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4286 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4287
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004288- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4289 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4290
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004291- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4292 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4293 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4294 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4295
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004296- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4297 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4298 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4299
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004300- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4301
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004302- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4303
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004304- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4305 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4306 that are still imported into string.py).
4307
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004308- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4309
4310- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4311 Now it does.
4312
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004313- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4314
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004315- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4316 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4317 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4318 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4319 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004320 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4321 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004322
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004323- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4324 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4325 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4326 'help(object)'.
4327
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004328Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004329-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004330
4331- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004332 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004333 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4334 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4335
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004336- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004337 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4338 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004339
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004340C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004341-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004342
4343- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4344 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004345
4346----
4347
4348**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**