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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
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +000015- Unicode type got two new methods; iswide() and width(). They
16 manipulate east asian width information as of Unicode TR11.
17
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +000018- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
19 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
20
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +000021- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
22
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000023- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
24 new documentation and modified profiler and bdb modules for more details
25
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +000026- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
27
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +000028- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
29
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +000030- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
31 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
32
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +000033- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
34 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
35 Fixes bug #858016 .
36
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000037- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
38 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
39 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
40
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000041- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
42 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
43 improves their performance (about 35%).
44
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000045- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
46 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
47 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
48
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000049- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
50 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
51 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
52 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
53
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000054- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
55 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
56 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
57 length is not known).
58
59- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
60 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000061 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
62 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000063 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
64
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +000065- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
66 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
67
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000068- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
69 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
70 keyword arguments.
71
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000072- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
73 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
74 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
75
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000076- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
77 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
78 cases.
79
80- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
81 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
82 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
83 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
84 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
85 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
86 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
87 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
88 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
89 a release build.
90
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +000091- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
92 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
93
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000094- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +000095 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000096
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +000097- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
98 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
99 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
100 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
101 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
102 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
103 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
104 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
105 destroyed.
106
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000107- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
108 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
109 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
110 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
111 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
112 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
113 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
114 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
115
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000116- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
117 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
118 character other than a space.
119
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000120- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
121 by the function object or by the method object, the function
122 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
123 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
124 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
125 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
126 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
127 attributes with the same name.
128
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000129- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
130 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
131 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
132 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
133 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
134 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
135 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
136 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
137 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
138 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
139 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
140 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
141 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
142 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000143
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000144- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
145 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
146 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
147 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
148 This has been repaired.
149
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000150- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
151
152- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
153
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000154- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
155 over a sequence.
156
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000157- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000158 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000159
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000160- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
161
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000162- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
163 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
164 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
165 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
166 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
167 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
168 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
169 records with equal keys is unchanged).
170
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000171- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
172 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
173 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
174
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000175- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
176 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
177 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
178 freelist.
179
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000180- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
181 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
182
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000183- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
184 number.
185
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000186- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
187 a TypeError exception.
188
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000189- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
190 820195.
191
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000192- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
193 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
194 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
195
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000196- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
197 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
198 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000199
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000200- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
201 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
202 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
203
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000204- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
205 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000206 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000207
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000208- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000209 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
210 the first call.
211
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000212
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000213Extension modules
214-----------------
215
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000216- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
217
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000218- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
219 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
220
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000221- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
222 fewer false positives.
223
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000224- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
225 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
226
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000227- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
228 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
229
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000230- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
231 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000232 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
233 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
234 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000235
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000236- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
237 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
238 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
239 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
240
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000241- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
242 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
243 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
244 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
245 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
246 #897625.
247
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000248- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
249 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
250
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000251- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
252 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
253 and pops on either side of the deque.
254
255- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
256 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
257
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000258- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
259 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
260 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
261 other functions that expect a function argument.
262
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000263- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
264
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000265- os.getsid was added.
266
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000267- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
268 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
269 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
270
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000271- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
272
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000273- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
274
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000275- readline.clear_history was added.
276
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000277- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
278
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000279- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
280
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000281- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
282
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000283- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
284
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000285- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
286
287- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
288
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000289- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
290
291- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
292
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000293- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
294 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
295 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
296
297- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
298 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
299 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
300 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
301 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
302 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
303 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
304
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000305- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
306 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
307 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
308 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000309
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000310- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
311 iterators from a single iterable.
312
313- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
314 of raising a TypeError exception.
315
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000316- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
317 as parameter.
318
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000319Library
320-------
321
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000322- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
323 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
324 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
325
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000326- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
327 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
328 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
329
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000330- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
331
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000332- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
333
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000334- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
335 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
336
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000337- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
338 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
339 type pattern with the same value exists.
340
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000341- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
342 when run from the command prompt).
343
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000344- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
345 not taken into consideration when caching value.
346
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000347- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
348 default sort).
349
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000350- Added global runctx function to profile module
351
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000352- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
353
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000354- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
355
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000356- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
357
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000358- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
359 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
360 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
361 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
362 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
363 accordingly.
364
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000365- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
366 decoding standards.
367
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000368- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
369 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
370 called for all requests.
371
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000372- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
373 they are passed to the compiler.
374
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000375- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
376 indent, width and depth.
377
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000378- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
379 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
380
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000381- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
382 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
383
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000384- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
385
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000386- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
387
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000388- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
389
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000390- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
391 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
392
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000393- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
394 for better performance
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000395
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000396- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
397 a string).
398
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000399- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
400
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000401- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
402
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000403- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
404
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000405- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
406
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000407- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
408 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
409 list of fieldnames.
410
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000411- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
412 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
413
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000414- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
415
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000416- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
417 empty lists.
418
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000419- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
420 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
421 and shelves.
422
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000423- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
424 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
425
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000426- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000427 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
428 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000429
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000430- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
431 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000432 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000433
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000434- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000435 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
436 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
437
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000438- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
439 and removed in Py2.4.
440
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000441- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
442
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000443- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
444
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000445Tools/Demos
446-----------
447
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000448- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
449 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
450
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000451- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
452
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000453- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
454 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
455 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
456 destination in situations where both files are given.
457
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000458- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
459 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
460 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
461 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
462
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000463- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
464
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000465- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
466 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
467 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
468 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
469 now.
470
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000471- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
472 in effect
473
474- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
475 C-c C-h
476
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000477- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
478 -d option was given.
479
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000480Build
481-----
482
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000483- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
484 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
485
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000486- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
487 removed.
488
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000489- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
490 supported (see PEP 11).
491
492- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
493
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000494- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
495
496- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
497 (see PEP 11).
498
499- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
500 sizeof(char) must be 1.
501
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000502C API
503-----
504
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000505- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
506 generator objects.
507
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000508- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
509 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000510 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
511 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000512
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000513- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
514 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
515
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000516- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
517 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
518 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
519 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
520 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
521
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000522- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
523 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
524 about 10% faster.
525
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000526- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
527 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
528
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000529- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
530 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
531 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
532 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
533
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000534New platforms
535-------------
536
537Tests
538-----
539
540Windows
541-------
542
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000543- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
544 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
545 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
546 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
547
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000548- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
549 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
550 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
551
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000552Mac
553----
554
555
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000556What's New in Python 2.3 final?
557===============================
558
559*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
560
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000561IDLE
562----
563
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000564- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
565 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
566 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
567 context-menu actions.
568
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000569- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
570 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
571 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
572 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
573 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
574 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
575 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
576 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
577 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
578
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000579
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000580What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
581=============================================
582
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000583*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000584
585Core and builtins
586-----------------
587
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000588- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000589 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000590 comment at the end are still unsupported.
591
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000592Extension modules
593-----------------
594
595- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
596 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
597 than once. This has been fixed.
598
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000599- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
600 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
601 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
602 call.
603
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000604- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
605
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000606Library
607-------
608
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000609- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
610 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
611
612- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
613 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
614 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
615 restored.
616
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000617IDLE
618----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000619
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000620- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000621
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000622Build
623-----
624
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000625- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
626 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
627
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000628C API
629-----
630
631Windows
632-------
633
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000634- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
635 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
636
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000637- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
638
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000639Mac
640---
641
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000642- Various fixes to pimp.
643
644- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
645
646- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
647 more problems than it solves.
648
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000649
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000650What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
651=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000652
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000653*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
654
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000655Core and builtins
656-----------------
657
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000658- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
659 by sys.setcheckinterval().
660
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000661- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
662 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000663 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000664
665- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
666 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
667 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000668 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000669
670- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
671 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000672
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000673- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
674 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
675 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
676
677- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000678 770247.
679
680- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000681
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000682Extension modules
683-----------------
684
685- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
686 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
687
688- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
689
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000690- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
691
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000692- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
693 contained within the _strptime module.
694
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000695- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
696 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
697
698- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000699 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
700
701- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
702 the find_class attribute, if present.
703
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000704- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000705
706 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
707 (SF bug 763298).
708
709 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000710 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
711 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
712 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000713
714 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
715
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000716Library
717-------
718
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000719- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
720
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000721- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
722 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
723 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
724 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
725 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
726 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
727 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
728 or Tester().
729
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000730- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
731 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
732 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
733 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
734 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
735 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
736 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
737 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
738 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000739
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000740 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000741
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000742- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
743 weren't before was an oversight.
744
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000745- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
746 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
747
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000748- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
749 when there are no lines.
750
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000751- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
752 which could occur with Tk 8.4
753
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000754- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
755 to child processes.
756
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000757- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
758
759- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
760
761- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
762 xmlrpclib.
763
764- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
765 responses.
766
767- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
768 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
769
770- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
771 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
772 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
773
774- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
775 used as patterns.
776
777- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
778 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
779 than Tk 8.3.
780
781- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
782
783- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000784
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000785Tools/Demos
786-----------
787
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000788- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
789
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000790- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
791
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000792- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000793
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000794Build
795-----
796
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000797- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
798
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000799- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
800
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000801- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
802 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000803
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000804- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
805 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
806 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000807
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000808C API
809-----
810
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000811- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
812 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
813
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000814Windows
815-------
816
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000817- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
818 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
819 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
820 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
821 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
822 Python exception ::
823
824 thread.error: can't start new thread
825
826 is raised now.
827
828- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
829 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
830 instead of from DLL teardown.
831
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000832Mac
833---
834
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000835- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000836 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000837 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
838 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
839 the executable in the bundle.
840
841- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000842
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000843- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
844
845- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
846 on Panther.
847
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000848What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
849================================
850
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000851*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000852
853Core and builtins
854-----------------
855
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000856- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
857 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
858 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
859 with the -i option.
860
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000861- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
862 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
863
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000864- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
865 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
866
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000867- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
868 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
869 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
870 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
871 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
872 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
873 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
874 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
875 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
876 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
877 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
878 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
879 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000880
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000881- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
882 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
883 embedded in a lambda expression.
884
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000885- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
886 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
887 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
888 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
889 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
890
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000891- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
892 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
893 matches the restriction on classic classes.
894
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000895- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
896 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
897
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000898- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
899 It's writable again.
900
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000901- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
902 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
903 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000904 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000905
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000906- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
907 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
908 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
909
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000910Extension modules
911-----------------
912
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000913- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
914 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
915
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000916- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
917 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
918 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
919 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
920
921- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
922 collection.
923
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000924- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
925 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
926 unique within a single program run.
927
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000928- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
929 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
930
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000931- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
932 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
933
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000934- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
935 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000936
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000937- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
938
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000939- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
940 Fixes SF bug #730685.
941
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000942- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
943 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
944 for many BSD-derived systems.
945
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000946
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000947Library
948-------
949
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000950- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
951 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
952 primary ones:
953
954 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
955 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
956 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
957
958 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
959 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
960 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
961 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
962 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
963 framework features (which doctest lacks).
964
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000965- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
966 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
967 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
968 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
969 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
970 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
971 argument.
972
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000973- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
974 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
975 in the archive.
976
977- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
978 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
979
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000980- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
981 569574).
982
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000983- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
984 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
985 no more.
986
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000987- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
988 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
989 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
990 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
991 code coverage.
992
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000993- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
994 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
995 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000996 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
997 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000998
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000999- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1000 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1001 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001002 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001003
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001004- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1005
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001006- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1007 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1008 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1009 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1010
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001011- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1012 handling.
1013
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001014- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1015 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1016
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001017- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1018 in socket.py.
1019
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001020- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1021
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001022- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1023 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1024 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1025 opener with proxy support.
1026
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001027- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1028
1029- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1030
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001031Tools/Demos
1032-----------
1033
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001034- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1035
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001036- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1037
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001038- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1039 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001040
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001041- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1042 files.
1043
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001044Build
1045-----
1046
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001047- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001048 different root directory.
1049
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001050C API
1051-----
1052
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001053- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1054 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1055 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1056 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1057 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1058 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1059 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1060 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1061 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1062 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1063
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001064- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1065 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1066 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1067 from Python.
1068
1069
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001070New platforms
1071-------------
1072
1073None this time.
1074
1075Tests
1076-----
1077
1078- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1079 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1080
1081Windows
1082-------
1083
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001084- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1085
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001086- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1087 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1088 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1089 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1090 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1091 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1092 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1093 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1094 that's what it's for.
1095
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001096Mac
1097---
1098
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001099- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1100 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1101 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1102 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001103- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1104 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1105- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001106
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001107SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1108------------------------------------
1109
1110430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1111598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1112622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1113661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1114683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1115697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1116713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1117724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1118727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1119729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1120730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1121731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1122732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1123733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1124735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1125740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1126744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1127745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1128747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1129749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1130751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1131753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1132755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1133757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1134760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1135
1136
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001137What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1138================================
1139
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001140*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001141
1142Core and builtins
1143-----------------
1144
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001145- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1146 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1147
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001148- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1149 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1150 and cannot be strings).
1151
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001152- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1153 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1154 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1155 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1156
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001157- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1158 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1159 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1160 Python itself.
1161
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001162- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1163 the referenced object, if it has one.
1164
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001165- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1166 the thread started at
1167 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1168
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001169- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1170 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1171 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1172 placed on a list index.
1173
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001174- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1175 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1176 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1177 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1178
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001179- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1180 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1181 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1182 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1183 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1184 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1185 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1186
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001187- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1188 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1189 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1190 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1191 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1192
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001193- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1194 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001195
1196- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1197 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1198 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1199 #693195.)
1200
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001201- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1202 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001203
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001204- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001205 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001206 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1207 interpreter executions, would fail.
1208
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001209- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001210 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001211 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001212
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001213Extension modules
1214-----------------
1215
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001216- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1217 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1218 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1219 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1220
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001221- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1222 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1223
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001224- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1225 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1226 and Greg Chapman.)
1227
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001228- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1229 recursively.
1230
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001231- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001232 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1233 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1234 leaks.
1235
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001236- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1237
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001238- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1239 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1240 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1241 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1242 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1243 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1244 #705836.
1245
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001246- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001247 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1248
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001249- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1250 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1251 See SF bug #692416.
1252
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001253- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1254 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1255
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001256- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1257 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1258 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001259
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001260- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001261 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1262 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1263
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001264- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1265 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1266 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1267 timeouts to work properly.
1268
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001269Library
1270-------
1271
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001272- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1273 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1274 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1275 future release.
1276
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001277- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1278 for querying platform dependent features.
1279
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001280- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001281
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001282- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1283 pickle protocol versions.
1284
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001285- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1286 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1287 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1288
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001289- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1290
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001291- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1292 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1293 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1294 modules.
1295
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001296- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1297 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1298 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1299
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001300- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1301 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1302
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001303- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1304 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1305 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1306
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001307- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001308 MS Office extensions.
1309
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001310- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1311 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1312
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001313- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1314 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1315
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001316- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1317 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1318 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1319 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1320 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1321 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1322
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001323- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1324 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1325 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001326
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001327- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1328 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1329 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1330
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001331- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1332
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001333- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1334 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1335 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1336
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001337Tools/Demos
1338-----------
1339
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001340- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1341 See the module docstring for details.
1342
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001343Build
1344-----
1345
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001346- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1347 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001348
1349C API
1350-----
1351
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001352- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1353
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001354- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1355 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1356 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1357
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001358- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1359 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001360
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001361 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1362 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1363 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001364
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001365- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001366 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1367
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001368- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1369 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1370 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001371
1372New platforms
1373-------------
1374
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001375None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001376
1377Tests
1378-----
1379
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001380- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1381 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001382
1383Windows
1384-------
1385
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001386- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1387 function.
1388
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001389- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1390 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001391
1392Mac
1393---
1394
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001395- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1396 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001397
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001398- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1399 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001400
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001401- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1402 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1403 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001404
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001405- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001406 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1407 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001408
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001409- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1410 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001411
1412
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001413What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1414=================================
1415
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001416*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001417
1418Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001419-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001420
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001421- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1422 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1423 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1424
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001425- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1426 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1427 (SF patch #664376.)
1428
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001429- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1430 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1431 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1432 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1433 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1434 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001435 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001436
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001437- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1438 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1439 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1440 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001441 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001442
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001443- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1444 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1445 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1446 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1447 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1448 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1449 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1450 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1451 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1452 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1453 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1454
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001455- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1456 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1457 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1458 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1459 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1460 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1461
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001462- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1463 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1464
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001465- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1466 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1467 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1468 case.)
1469
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001470- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1471 passed as unicode strings.
1472
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001473- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1474 See SF bug #683467.
1475
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001476- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1477 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1478
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001479- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1480
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001481- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1482
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001483- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1484 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1485 arguments.
1486
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001487- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1488 See SF bug #667147.
1489
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001490- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001491 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001492 See SF bug #676155.
1493
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001494- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001495 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001496 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1497 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1498 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1499 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1500 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1501 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001502
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001503Extension modules
1504-----------------
1505
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001506- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1507 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1508 tp_as_number pointer.
1509
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001510- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1511 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1512 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1513 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1514 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1515
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001516- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1517
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001518- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1519
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001520- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001521 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001522 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1523 patch #678531.)
1524
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001525- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1526 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1527
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001528- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1529 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1530
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001531- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1532
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001533- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1534 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1535 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1536
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001537- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1538
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001539- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1540 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1541
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001542- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001543
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001544- datetime changes:
1545
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001546 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1547
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001548 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1549 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1550 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1551 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1552 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1553 now.
1554
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001555 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001556 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1557 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001558
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001559 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001560 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001561 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1562 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1563 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1564 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001565
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001566 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1567 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1568 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001569 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1570
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001571 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1572 by a later example coded by Guido.
1573
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001574 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001575 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1576 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1577 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001578 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1579 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1580
1581 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1582 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1583 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1584 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1585 tzinfo subclass instance.
1586
1587 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1588 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1589 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1590 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1591 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1592 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1593 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1594 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001595
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001596 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1597 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1598 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1599 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1600 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001601 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1602
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001603 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001604
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001605 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1606 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1607 as a naive datetime object.
1608
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001609 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1610 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1611 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1612
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001613 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1614 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1615 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1616 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1617 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1618 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1619 comparison.
1620
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001621 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1622 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1623 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1624 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001625 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001626
1627 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001628
1629 and ::
1630
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001631 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1632
1633 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1634 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1635 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1636 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1637
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001638 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1639 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1640 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1641 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1642 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1643
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001644 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1645 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001646 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1647 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001648
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001649Library
1650-------
1651
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001652- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1653 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1654
1655- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1656 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1657 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1658 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1659 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1660 See PEP 307 for details.
1661
1662- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1663 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1664
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001665- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1666 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001667 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001668 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1669 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001670 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001671
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001672- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1673 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1674
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001675- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1676 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1677 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1678
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001679- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1680
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001681- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1682 exception.
1683
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001684- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1685 class.
1686
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001687- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1688 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1689 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1690
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001691- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1692 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1693
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001694- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001695 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1696 See SF bug #659228.
1697
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001698- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1699 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1700 See SF patch #651082.
1701
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001702- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001703
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001704- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1705 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1706
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001707- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001708 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001709
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001710- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1711 DOS paths from other platforms.
1712
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001713Tools/Demos
1714-----------
1715
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001716- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1717 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1718 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1719 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1720 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1721 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1722 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1723 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1724 example:
1725
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001726 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1727 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001728
1729 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1730
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001731
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001732Build
1733-----
1734
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001735- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1736 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1737 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001738 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1739
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001740 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1741
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001742- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1743 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1744 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1745 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1746 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1747 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1748 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1749 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1750 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1751
1752- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1753 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1754 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1755 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1756
1757- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1758 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1759
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001760C API
1761-----
1762
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001763- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1764 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001765
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001766- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1767 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1768 tp_as_number pointer.
1769
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001770- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1771 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1772 (SF #681367)
1773
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001774- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1775 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1776 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1777 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001778
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001779Tests
1780-----
1781
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001782- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001783 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1784 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1785 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1786 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1787 pydoc.)
1788
1789- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1790
1791- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001792
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001793Windows
1794-------
1795
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001796- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1797 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1798 time).
1799
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001800- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1801 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1802
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001803- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1804 release without strong cryptography.
1805
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001806- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001807 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001808
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001809- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1810 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1811
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001812Mac
1813---
1814
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001815- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1816 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001817
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001818- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1819 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1820 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001821
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001822- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1823 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001824
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001825- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1826 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1827 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1828 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001829
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001830- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001831 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1832 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1833 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001834
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001835
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001836What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001837=================================
1838
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001839*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001840
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001841Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001842--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001843
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001844- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1845
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001846- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1847 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001848 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001849 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001850 a different meaning than before.
1851
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001852- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001853 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001854 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001855
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001856- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001857 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001858 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001859
1860- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1861 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1862 and deallocation.
1863
1864- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1865 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1866
1867- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1868 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1869 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1870 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1871 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1872
1873- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1874 now detected by the garbage collector.
1875
1876- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1877 [SF bug 519621]
1878
1879- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1880 identifier.
1881
1882- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1883 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1884 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1885 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1886 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1887 [SF bug 563060]
1888
1889- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1890 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1891 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1892 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1893 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1894
1895- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1896 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1897 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1898
1899- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1900
1901- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1902 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1903 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1904 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1905 state of the slots would be lost.)
1906
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001907Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001908-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001909
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001910- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001911 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1912 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1913 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1914 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001915 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1916 Jython 2.1.
1917
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001918- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001919 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001920 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1921 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1922 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1923 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1924 these, see PEP 302.
1925
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001926- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1927 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1928 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1929
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001930- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1931 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1932 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1933
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001934- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1935 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1936 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1937
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001938- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1939 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1940 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1941 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1942 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1943 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1944 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1945 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1946 releases or implementations.
1947
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001948- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001949 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1950 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001951
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001952- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1953 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1954
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001955- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1956 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1957 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1958
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001959- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1960 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1961
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001962- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1963 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001964 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1965 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001966
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001967- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1968 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1969 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1970 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1971 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1972
1973 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1974 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1975 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1976 pattern.
1977
1978 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1979 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1980 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1981 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1982
1983 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1984 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1985 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1986 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1987 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1988 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1989
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001990- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1991 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1992 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1993 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1994 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1995 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1996 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1997 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001998
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001999- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2000 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2001 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2002 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2003 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002004 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2005 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2006 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2007 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2008 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2009 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2010 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002011
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002012- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2013 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2014
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002015- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2016 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2017 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2018 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2019 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2020 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2021 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2022 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2023 to Zack Weinberg!
2024
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002025- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2026 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2027 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2028 type. This has been fixed now.
2029
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002030- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2031 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2032 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2033
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002034- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2035 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2036 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2037 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2038 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2039 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2040 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2041 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002042 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002043
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002044- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2045 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2046 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002047
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002048- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2049 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2050 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2051 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2052 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2053 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2054 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2055 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002056 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002057 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2058 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2059
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002060- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2061 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2062 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2063 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2064 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2065 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2066 this.)
2067
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002068- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2069 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002070 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002071 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002072 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2073 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002074 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2075 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002076
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002077- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2078 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2079 currently running.
2080
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002081- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2082 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2083 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2084 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2085
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002086- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2087 as directory names.
2088
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002089- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2090 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2091
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002092- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2093 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2094
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002095- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002096 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2097 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002098
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002099- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2100 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2101 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2102 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2103 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2104
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002105- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2106 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2107 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2108 removed.
2109
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002110- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2111 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2112 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2113
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002114- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2115 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2116 to __debug__.
2117
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002118- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2119 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2120 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2121
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002122- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2123 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2124 deprecated now.
2125
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002126- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2127 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2128 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002129
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002130- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2131 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2132 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2133 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2134 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002135
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002136- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2137 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2138
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002139- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2140 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2141 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002142 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002143 is backward compatible.
2144
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002145- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2146 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2147 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2148 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2149 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2150
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002151- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2152 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2153 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2154 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2155 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2156 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002157
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002158- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2159 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2160
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002161- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2162 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2163
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002164- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2165 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2166 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2167 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2168 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2169
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002170- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2171 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2172 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2173
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002174- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002175 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2176
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002177- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2178 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2179 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002180
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002181- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2182 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2183
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002184- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2185 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2186 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2187
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002188- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2189
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002190Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002191-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002192
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002193- Added three operators to the operator module:
2194 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2195 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2196 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2197
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002198- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2199
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002200- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2201 archives.
2202
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002203- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2204 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2205 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2206
2207 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2208
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002209- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2210 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2211 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002212 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002213
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002214- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2215 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2216 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2217 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002218 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2219 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2220 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2221 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002222
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002223- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2224 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002225
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002226- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2227
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002228- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2229 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2230
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002231- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2232 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2233 supported.
2234
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002235- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2236
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002237- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2238 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002239
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002240- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2241 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2242
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002243- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2244
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002245- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2246 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2247
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002248- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2249 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2250 functions but callable type objects.
2251
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002252- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002253 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002254 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002255
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002256- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2257 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002258
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002259- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2260 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002261
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002262- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2263 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2264 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2265 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2266
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002267- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2268 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002269
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002270- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2271 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2272 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2273 and __imul__.
2274
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002275- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002276 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2277 is called.
2278
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002279- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2280 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2281 interpreter was compiled.
2282
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002283- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2284 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2285 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002286 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002287 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2288 1, not 2.
2289
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002290- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2291 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2292 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2293 limit.
2294
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002295- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2296 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2297 bug #623464.
2298
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002299- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2300 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2301 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2302 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2303
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002304Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002305-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002306
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002307- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2308
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002309- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2310 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2311 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2312 with Python 2.3a2.
2313
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002314- os.path exposes getctime.
2315
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002316- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002317 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002318 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002319 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002320 unit tests of floating point results.
2321
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002322- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2323 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2324 has been increased.
2325
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002326- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2327 executed.
2328
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002329- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2330 postinstallation script.
2331
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002332- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2333 test the current module.
2334
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002335- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002336 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2337 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2338 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2339 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2340
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002341- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002342 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002343 Ward's Optik package.
2344
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002345- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2346 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2347 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2348 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2349
2350- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2351 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002352 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002353
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002354- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2355 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2356 shelf are binary pickles.
2357
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002358- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2359 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2360
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002361- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2362 modules are iterators now.
2363
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002364- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2365 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2366 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2367 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2368 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2369 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002370
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002371- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2372 with their entity value.
2373
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002374- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2375
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002376- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2377 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002378
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002379- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2380 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002381 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002382
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002383- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2384 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2385 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2386 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2387 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2388 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2389 main():
2390
2391 import locale
2392 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2393
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002394- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2395 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2396
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002397- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2398 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2399 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2400 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2401 to the new standard.
2402
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002403- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2404 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2405 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2406 an extension to the database.
2407
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002408- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2409 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2410 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2411 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002412 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002413
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002414- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002415 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002416
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002417- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2418 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2419 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2420 bounded integers.
2421
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002422- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2423 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2424 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2425 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2426 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2427 in existence.
2428
2429 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2430 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2431 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2432 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2433 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2434 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2435
2436 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2437 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2438 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2439 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2440
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002441- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2442 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2443 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2444
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002445- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2446
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002447- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2448 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2449 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2450 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2451
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002452- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2453 argument.
2454
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002455- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2456 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2457 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2458 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2459 [SF patch 560794].
2460
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002461- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2462 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2463 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002464 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2465 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2466 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002467
2468- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2469 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002470
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002471- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2472 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2473 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2474 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002475
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002476- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2477 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2478 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2479 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2480 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2481
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002482- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002483
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002484- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2485
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002486- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2487 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2488 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2489 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2490 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2491 identical to None.
2492
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002493- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2494 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2495 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2496 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2497 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2498 results now.
2499
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002500- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2501 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2502
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002503- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2504 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2505 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2506 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2507 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2508 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2509 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2510 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2511
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002512- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2513
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002514- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2515 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2516
2517- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2518 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2519 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2520 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2521 and other systems.
2522
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002523- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2524 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2525 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2526 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 +00002527 work well with these.
2528
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002529- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2530
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002531- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002532 connections.
2533
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002534- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2535 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2536 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2537
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002538- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2539 sets
2540
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002541- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2542 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2543 name.
2544
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002545- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2546 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2547 passed in.
2548
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002549- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002550 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002551 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2552 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002553
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002554- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2555
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002556- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2557
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002558- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2559 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2560 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2561
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002562- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2563 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2564 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2565 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002566 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002567
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002568- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002569 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002570 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002571
2572- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2573 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2574 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2575
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002576- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002577 the value of its expression argument.
2578
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002579- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2580 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2581 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2582
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002583- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2584 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2585 skipstone browser was included.
2586
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002587- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2588 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2589
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002590Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002591-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002592
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002593- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2594 names in addition to accepting file names.
2595
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002596- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2597 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2598 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2599 still used and useful.)
2600
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002601- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2602 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2603 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2604 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002605
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002606- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2607 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2608 the generated binary.
2609
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002610Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002611-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002612
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002613- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2614
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002615- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2616 except in the hands of experts.
2617
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002618- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002619 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2620 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2621 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002622
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002623- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2624 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2625 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2626 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2627 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2628 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2629 builds.
2630
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002631- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2632 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2633 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2634 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2635 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2636 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2637 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2638 new type.
2639
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002640- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002641
2642 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2643 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2644 positive infinities.
2645
2646 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2647 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2648 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2649 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2650 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2651 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2652 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2653
2654 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2655
2656 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2657
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002658- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2659 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2660 size of the executable.
2661
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002662- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2663 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2664 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2665 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002666
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002667- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2668
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002669- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2670 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2671 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002672
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002673- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2674 well as Unix.
2675
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002676- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2677 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2678 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2679 modules in the README file for details.
2680
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002681C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002682-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002683
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002684- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2685 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002686 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002687 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002688 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002689
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002690- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2691 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2692 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2693 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2694 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2695 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002696 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002697 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2698 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2699 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2700 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2701 aligned.)
2702
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002703- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2704 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2705 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2706
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002707- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2708 level.
2709
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002710- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2711 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2712 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2713 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2714 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2715
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002716- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2717 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2718 code.
2719
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002720- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2721 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2722 adjusting for negative indices.
2723
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002724- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2725 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2726 object.
2727
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002728- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2729 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2730 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2731
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002732- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2733 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002734
2735- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2736
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002737- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2738 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2739 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2740 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2741
2742- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2743
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002744- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002745
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002746- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002747 without going through the buffer API.
2748
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002749- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002750
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002751- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2752 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2753 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2754 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2755
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002756- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2757 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2758
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002759- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002760 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2761
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002762New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002763-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002764
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002765- OpenVMS is now supported.
2766
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002767- AtheOS is now supported.
2768
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002769- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2770
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002771- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2772
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002773Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002774-----
2775
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002776- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2777 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2778 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002779
2780Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002781-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002782
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002783- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2784 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2785 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2786 bugs.
2787 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002788 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002789 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2790 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002791 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002792
2793- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002794 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002795
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002796- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2797 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2798
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002799- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2800 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002801 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002802 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2803
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002804- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2805 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2806 use files" uninstall option).
2807
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002808- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2809
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002810- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2811 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2812
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002813- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2814 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2815 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2816
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002817- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2818 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2819 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2820 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2821 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002822 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2823 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2824 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002825
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002826- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002827 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002828 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2829 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2830 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2831 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2832 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2833 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2834 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2835 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2836 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2837 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2838 work around.
2839
2840- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2841 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2842 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2843 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2844 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2845 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2846 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2847 specified with O_CREAT too).
2848
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002849Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002850----
2851
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002852- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002853
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002854- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2855 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2856 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2857
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002858- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2859 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2860 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2861
2862- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2863 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2864 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2865 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2866 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2867 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2868 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2869 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002870
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002871- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2872 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2873 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002874
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002875- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2876 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2877 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2878 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2879 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002880
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002881- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2882 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2883 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002884
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002885- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2886 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002887
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002888- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2889 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2890 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2891 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2892 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002893
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002894- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2895 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2896 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2897
2898- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2899 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2900 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002901
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002902- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2903 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2904 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2905 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002906 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002907
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002908- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2909 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002910
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002911- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2912 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002913
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002914- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002915 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002916 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2917 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002918
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002919
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002920What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002921===============================
2922
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002923*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2924
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002925Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002926--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002927
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002928- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2929 with a custom metaclass.
2930
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002931Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002932-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002933
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002934- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2935 are proxies.
2936
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002937Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002938-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002939
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002940- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2941 very short strings.
2942
2943- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2944 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2945 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2946 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2947 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2948
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002949Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002950-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002951
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002952- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2953 close or delete time).
2954
2955- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2956 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2957
2958- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2959
2960- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002961 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002962
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002963Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002964-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002965
2966Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002967-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002968
2969C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002970-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002971
2972New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002973-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002974
2975Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002976-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002977
2978Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002979-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002980
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002981- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2982
2983- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2984 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2985
2986- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2987 deleted at process exit time.
2988
2989- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2990 in backslash.
2991
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002992Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002993----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002994
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002995- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2996 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2997 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2998
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002999
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003000What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003001===========================
3002
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003003*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3004
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003005Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003006--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003007
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003008- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3009 been extensively updated. See
3010
3011 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3012
3013 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3014
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003015- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3016 deleted!
3017
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003018- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3019 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3020 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3021 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3022 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3023
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003024- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3025
3026 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3027 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3028
3029 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3030 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3031 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3032 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3033 supported anyway.
3034
3035 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3036 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3037
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003038- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3039 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3040 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3041 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3042 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003043
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003044- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3045 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3046 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3047
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003048Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003049-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003050
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003051- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3052 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3053 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3054 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3055 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3056 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003057 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3058 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3059 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3060 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003061
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003062- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3063 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3064 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3065
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003066Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003067-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003068
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003069- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3070
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003071Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003072-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003073
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003074- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3075 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3076 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3077 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3078 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3079 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3080
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003081- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3082
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003083- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3084
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003085- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3086
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003087- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3088 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3089 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3090
3091- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3092
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003093Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003094-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003095
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003096- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3097 off a search on Google.
3098
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003099Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003100-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003101
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003102- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3103 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3104 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3105 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3106 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3107 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3108 other platforms should do likewise.
3109
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003110- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3111 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3112 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3113
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003114C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003115-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003116
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003117- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3118 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3119 producing key-value pairs.
3120
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003121- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003122 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003123 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3124 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3125 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3126 previously went unchallenged.
3127
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003128New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003129-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003130
3131Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003132-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003133
3134Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003135-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003136
3137Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003138----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003139
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003140- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3141 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003142
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003143- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3144 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3145 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3146 home.
3147
3148
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003149What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003150===========================
3151
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003152*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3153
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003154Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003155--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003156
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003157- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3158 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003159
3160 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003161 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003162
3163 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3164 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003165 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003166 This needs to be documented.
3167
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003168- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3169 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3170
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003171- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3172 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3173 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3174
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003175- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3176 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3177
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003178- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3179 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3180 class forbids it).
3181
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003182- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3183 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3184 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3185
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003186- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3187
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003188Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003189-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003190
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003191- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3192 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003193 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003194
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003195- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3196 (like 1 + '').
3197
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003198Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003199-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003200
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003201- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3202 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3203 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3204 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003205 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003206 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3207
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003208- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3209 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3210 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3211 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3212
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003213- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3214 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003215 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3216 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3217 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003218
3219- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3220 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003221
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003222- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3223 bytes on its input.
3224
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003225Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003226-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003227
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003228- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003229 convenience function.
3230
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003231- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3232 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3233 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003234 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3235 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3236 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3237 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3238 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3239 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003240
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003241- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3242 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3243 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3244 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3245
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003246- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3247 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3248 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3249
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003250- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3251 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3252 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3253 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3254
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003255- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3256 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003257 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003258 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3259 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3260 new -l and -e options.
3261
3262- statcache is now deprecated.
3263
3264- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3265 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003266 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003267 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3268 time properly taken into account.
3269
3270- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3271 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3272 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3273 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3274
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003275Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003276-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003277
3278Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003279-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003280
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003281- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3282 is built with libdb3 if available.
3283
3284- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3285
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003286C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003287-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003288
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003289- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3290 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3291 PySequence_Size().
3292
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003293- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3294
3295- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3296 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3297 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3298
3299- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3300 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3301
3302- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3303 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3304
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003305New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003306-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003307
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003308- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3309 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3310
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003311- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3312 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3313
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003314- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3315
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003316Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003317-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003318
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003319- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3320 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3321
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003322Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003323-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003324
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003325Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003326----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003327
3328- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3329 removed completely in the next release.
3330
3331- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3332 OSX.
3333
3334- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3335 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3336
3337- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3338
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003339
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003340What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003341===========================
3342
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003343*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3344
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003345Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003346--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003347
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003348- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003349 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003350 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003351 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3352 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003353 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3354 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003355 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3356 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003357
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003358- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3359 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3360
3361- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3362 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3363
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003364Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003365-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003366
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003367- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3368 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3369 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3370 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3371 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3372 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3373 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3374 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3375
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003376- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3377 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3378 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3379 example).
3380
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003381- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003382 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003383 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003384 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003385
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003386- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3387 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3388 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003389 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003390
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003391- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3392 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3393 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3394 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3395 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3396 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3397
3398 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3399
3400 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3401
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003402Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003403-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003404
3405- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3406
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003407- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3408
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003409- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3410 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003411
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003412- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3413 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3414 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3415 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3416 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3417 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003418 attributes.
3419
3420- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3421 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3422 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003423
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003424- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3425 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3426 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003427
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003428- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3429 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3430 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003431 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3432 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3433
3434- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3435 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003436
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003437Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003438-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003439
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003440- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3441 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3442
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003443- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3444 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3445 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3446 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3447
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003448- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3449 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3450 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3451 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3452
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003453 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3454 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3455 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3456 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3457 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3458 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3459 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3460 without losing information).
3461
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003462- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003463 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3464 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3465 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3466 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3467 module).
3468
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003469 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003470 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3471 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3472 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3473 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003474
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003475- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003476 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3477 encoding.
3478
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003479- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3480 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3481
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003482- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003483 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3484
3485- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3486 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3487 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3488 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3489
3490- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3491
3492- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3493 ON, and OFF.
3494
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003495- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3496 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3497
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003498Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003499-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003500
3501- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3502 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3503 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003504
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003505- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3506 been added: -X and -E.
3507
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003508Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003509-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003510
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003511- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3512 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3513
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003514C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003515-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003516
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003517- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3518 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3519 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3520 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3521 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3522
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003523- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3524 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3525 as long) arguments.
3526
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003527- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3528 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3529 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3530 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3531 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3532 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3533
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003534- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3535 input.
3536
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003537New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003538-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003539
3540Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003541-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003542
3543Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003544-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003545
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003546- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3547 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3548 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3549
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003550- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3551 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3552 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003553 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003554
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003555 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3556 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3557 import signal
3558 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003559
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003560 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003561 while 1:
3562 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003563 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003564 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3565 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3566 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3567 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003568
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003569
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003570What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3571===========================
3572
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003573*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3574
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003575Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003576--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003577
3578- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3579 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3580 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3581
3582- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3583 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3584 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3585 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3586 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3587 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3588 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003589
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003590- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003591 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003592 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3593 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3594 associate a docstring with a property.
3595
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003596- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3597 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3598 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3599 other built-in object types.
3600
3601- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3602 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3603 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3604 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3605 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3606
3607- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3608 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3609
3610- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3611 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003612 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003613 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3614 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3615 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3616 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3617 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3618
3619- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3620 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3621 class.
3622
3623- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3624 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3625 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3626 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3627
3628- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3629 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3630 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3631 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3632
3633- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3634 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3635
3636- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3637 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3638 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3639 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3640 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003641 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003642 with the same value as s.
3643
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003644- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3645
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003646Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003647----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003648
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003649- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3650
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003651- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3652 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3653 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3654 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3655 objects.
3656
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003657- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3658 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003659 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3660 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3661
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003662- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3663 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3664 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3665
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003666Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003667-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003668
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003669- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3670 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3671 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3672 by the instances.
3673
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003674- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3675 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3676 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3677
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003678- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3679 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3680 before the entire comparison is complete.
3681
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003682- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3683 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3684 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3685
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003686- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3687 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3688 getwriter().
3689
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003690- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3691 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3692
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003693- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003694 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3695 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3696
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003697- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3698 iterable object.
3699
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003700- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3701 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003702
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003703- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3704 authentication.
3705
3706- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3707 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003708
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003709- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003710 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3711 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3712 a sample driver.)
3713
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003714Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003715-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003716
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003717- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3718 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3719 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3720 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3721 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3722 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3723 kernel has large file support.
3724
3725- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3726 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3727 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3728 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3729 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3730
3731- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3732 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3733 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3734
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003735C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003736-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003737
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003738- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3739 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3740
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003741New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003742-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003743
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003744- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3745 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3746
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003747Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003748-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003749
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003750- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3751 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3752 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3753 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3754 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3755
3756- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3757 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3758 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3759 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3760
3761- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3762 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3763
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003764Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003765-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003766
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003767- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003768 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3769 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003770
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003771
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003772What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3773===========================
3774
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003775*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3776
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003777Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003778----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003779
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003780- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3781 big to represent as a C double.
3782
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003783- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3784 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3785 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3786 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3787 restriction).
3788
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003789- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3790 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3791 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3792 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3793 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3794
3795 >>> dir([])
3796 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3797 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3798 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3799 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3800 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3801 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3802 'reverse', 'sort']
3803
3804 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3805
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003806- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003807 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3808 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3809 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3810 OverflowError exception.
3811
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003812- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003813 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003814 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3815 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3816 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3817 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3818 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003819 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003820 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3821 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3822
3823 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3824 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3825 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3826 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003827
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003828- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003829 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3830 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3831 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3832 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3833 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3834 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3835 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3836 once it is created.
3837
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003838- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3839 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3840 (key, value) pairs.
3841
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003842- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003843 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3844 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3845
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003846- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3847 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3848 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3849 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3850 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003851
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003852- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003853 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3854 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3855
3856 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3857
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003858- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003859 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3860
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003861Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003862-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003863
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003864- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003865 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3866 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003867
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003868- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3869 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3870 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3871 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3872 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3873 in this area anymore).
3874
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003875- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3876 threading.Timer.
3877
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003878- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3879 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3880
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003881- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003882 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3883
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003884- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003885 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3886 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3887 converted to Python longs.
3888
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003889- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003890 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3891
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003892- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3893 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3894 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3895
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003896Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003897-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003898
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003899- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3900 division operators as per PEP 238.
3901
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003902Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003903-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003904
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003905- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3906 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3907 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3908 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3909
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003910C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003911-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003912
3913- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003914
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003915- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3916 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003917 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003918
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003919 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3920 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003921 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003922 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003923
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003924- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003925 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3926 module:
3927
3928 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003929
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003930 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3931 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003932
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003933 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3934 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003935
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003936 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3937
3938 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3939
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003940- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003941 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3942 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3943 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003944
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003945New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003946-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003947
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003948- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3949 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3950 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3951 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3952 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003953
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003954Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003955-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003956
3957Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003958-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003959
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003960- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3961 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3962 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3963 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003964 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3965 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3966 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3967 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3968 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003969
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003970- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003971 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3972
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003973
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003974What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3975===========================
3976
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003977*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3978
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003979Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003980-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003981
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003982- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3983 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3984
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003985- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3986 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3987 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003988
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003989- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3990 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3991 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3992 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003993
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003994- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3995
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003996- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003997
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003998Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003999-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004000
4001- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004002 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004003 the module docstring for details.
4004
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004005Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004006-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004007
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004008- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004009 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4010 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4011 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004012
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004013- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4014 Nick Mathewson.
4015
4016Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004017----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004018
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004019- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4020 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4021 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4022 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4023 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4024 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4025 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4026 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4027
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004028- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4029 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4030 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4031 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4032
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004033- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4034 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4035 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4036 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4037 come a long way).
4038
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004039- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4040 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4041 write filters for these warnings).
4042
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004043- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4044 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4045 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4046 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4047 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4048
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004049- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4050 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4051 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4052 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4053 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4054 older distribution.
4055
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004056Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004057-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004058
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004059- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4060 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004061 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004062
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004063- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4064 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4065 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4066
4067- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4068
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004069- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4070
4071- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4072
4073- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4074
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004075- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004076
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004077- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4078
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004079New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004080-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004081
4082C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004083-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004084
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004085- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4086 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4087 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4088 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4089 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4090 against buffer overruns.
4091
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004092- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004093 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4094 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004095 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4096 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4097 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4098
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004099- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4100 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4101 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4102 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4103 deprecated.
4104
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004105Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004106-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004107
4108- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4109 relevant is found.
4110
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004111
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004112What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004113===========================
4114
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004115*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4116
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004117Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004118----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004119
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004120- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4121 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4122 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4123 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4124 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4125 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4126 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4127 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004128 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004129 repaired.
4130
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004131- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004132 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004133 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4134 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4135 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4136 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4137 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4138 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4139 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4140 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4141
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004142- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4143 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4144 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4145 leading BMO character).
4146
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004147- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4148 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4149 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4150
4151 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4152 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4153 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004154
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004155 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4156 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4157 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4158 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4159 for various simple to use conversions.
4160
4161 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4162 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4163
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004164 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4165 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4166 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4167 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4168 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4169 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4170 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4171 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4172 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4173 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4174 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4175 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4176 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4177 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4178 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004179
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004180- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4181 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4182 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004183 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004184 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004185
4186 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004187 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4188 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4189 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4190 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4191 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004192 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4193 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004194
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004195 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4196 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4197 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004198 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004199
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004200- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4201 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4202 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4203 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4204 floating arithmetic,
4205
4206 x = 9007199254740992.0
4207 print long(x)
4208
4209 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4210 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4211 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4212 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4213 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4214 functions are of good quality).
4215
4216 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4217 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4218 algorithms to break.
4219
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004220- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4221 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4222 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4223 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4224 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4225 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4226 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4227 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4228 order.
4229
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004230- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4231 operation along the most common code paths.
4232
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004233- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4234 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4235
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004236- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4237 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4238 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4239 {}.update(UserDict())
4240
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004241- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4242 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4243 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4244 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4245 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4246 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4247 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4248 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4249
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004250- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004251 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004252
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004253 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004254 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4255 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004256 join() method of strings
4257 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004258 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4259 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004260 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004261 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004262
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004263- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4264 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4265
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004266- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4267 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4268
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004269- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4270 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4271 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4272 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4273
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004274- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4275 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004276 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004277 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4278 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004279
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004280- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4281
4282
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004283Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004284-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004285
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004286- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004287 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004288 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4289 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4290
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004291- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4292 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4293
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004294- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4295 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4296 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4297 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4298
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004299- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4300 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4301 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4302
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004303- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4304
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004305- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4306
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004307- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4308 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4309 that are still imported into string.py).
4310
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004311- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4312
4313- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4314 Now it does.
4315
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004316- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4317
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004318- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4319 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4320 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4321 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4322 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004323 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4324 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004325
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004326- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4327 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4328 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4329 'help(object)'.
4330
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004331Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004332-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004333
4334- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004335 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004336 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4337 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4338
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004339- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004340 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4341 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004342
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004343C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004344-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004345
4346- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4347 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004348
4349----
4350
4351**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**