blob: 3f4cbb1250650cee985f54a1cdc182caa9f50a9e [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000013- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
14 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error)
15
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000016- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
17
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000018- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
19 returning None.
20
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000021- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
22 ('\') with a specific error message.
23
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000024- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
25
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000026- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
27 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
28
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000029- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000030 an ferror() call.
31
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000032- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
33 list.sort().
34
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000035- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
36 (2+3) --> (5).
37
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000038- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
39
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000040- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
41 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000042
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000043- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
44 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
45 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
46
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000047Extension Modules
48-----------------
49
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +000050- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
51 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
52 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
53
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +000054- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
55
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +000056- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
57 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
58
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +000059- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
60 file size.
61
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +000062- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
63
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +000064- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
65 {remove_history,replace_history}
66
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000067- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
68 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000069
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000070- stat_float_times is now True.
71
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000072- array.array objects are now picklable.
73
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000074- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
75 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
76
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000077- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
78 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
79 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
80
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000081- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
82 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000083
84Library
85-------
86
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +000087- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
88 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
89
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +000090- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
91
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +000092- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
93 to build.
94
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +000095- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
96 symbolic links on Windows.
97
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +000098- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
99 profile.py if available.
100
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000101- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
102
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000103- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
104 in LWPCookieJar.
105
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000106- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
107
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000108- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
109
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000110- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
111
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000112- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
113
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000114- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
115
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000116- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
117
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000118- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
119
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000120- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
121
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000122- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
123 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
124 be exploited in various ways.
125
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000126- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
127
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000128- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
129
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000130- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
131
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000132- Enhancements to the csv module:
133
134 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
135 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
136 PEP 305.
137 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
138 reporting.
139 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
140 dictates.
141 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000142 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000143 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000144 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
145 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000146 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
147 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000148 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000149 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
150 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
151 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
152 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
153 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
154 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
155 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
156 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
157 without first creating a dialect class.
158 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
159 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
160 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000161 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000162 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
163 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000164 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
165 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
166 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
167 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000168 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
169 This has been fixed.
170
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000171- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
172 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
173 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
174 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
175
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000176- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
177
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000178- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
179 (Bug #951915).
180
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000181- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
182 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
183 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
184 encoding alias table
185
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000186- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
187
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000188- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
189 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
190
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000191- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
192
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000193- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
194
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000195- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
196
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000197- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
198
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000199- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
200
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000201- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
202 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
203 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
204
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000205- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000206 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000207
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000208- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
209 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
210 tokenizer with very long source lines.
211
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000212- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
213 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
214
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000215- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
216 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000217
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000218- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
219 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
220
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000221- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
222 correctly.
223
224
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000225Build
226-----
227
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000228- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
229
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000230- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
231 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
232
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000233- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
234 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
235 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
236 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
237 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
238 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
239 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
240 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
241
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000242- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
243 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
244 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
245 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
246
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000247
248C API
249-----
250
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000251- Removed PyRange_New().
252
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000253
254Tests
255-----
256
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000257- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000258
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000259
260Documentation
261-------------
262
263- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
264 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
265 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
266
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000267Mac
268---
269
270
271
272Tools/Demos
273-----------
274
275
276
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000277What's New in Python 2.4 final?
278===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000279
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000280*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000281
282Core and builtins
283-----------------
284
285- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
286 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
287 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
288
289
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000290What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
291==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000292
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000293*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000294
295Core and builtins
296-----------------
297
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000298- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
299 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
300 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
301
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000302
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000303Library
304-------
305
306- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
307 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
308 raised is re-raised.
309
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000310- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
311 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
312
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000313- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
314 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
315 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
316 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
317 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
318 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
319 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
320 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
321 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
322 by the slice are recomputed now.
323
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000324- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000325
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000326Build
327-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000328
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000329- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
330 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
331 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000332
333C API
334-----
335
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000336- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
337
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000338
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000339What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
340================================
341
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000342*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000343
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000344License
345-------
346
347The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
348is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
349changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
350Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
351intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
352durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
353the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
354License::
355
356 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
357
358says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
359to Python 2.1.1.
360
361The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
362License Version 2.
363
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000364Core and builtins
365-----------------
366
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000367- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
368 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
369 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
370 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
371 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
372 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
373 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
374 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
375 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
376 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
377
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000378- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000379
380Extension Modules
381-----------------
382
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000383- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
384 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
385 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
386 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000387
388Library
389-------
390
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000391- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
392 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
393 returned.
394
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000395- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
396
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000397- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
398 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
399
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000400- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
401
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000402- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
403 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000404
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000405- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
406
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000407- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
408
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000409- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000410 the source code is updated and reloaded.
411
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000412Build
413-----
414
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000415- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000416
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000417What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
418================================
419
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000420*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000421
422Core and builtins
423-----------------
424
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000425- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000426 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
427
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000428- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
429 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
430 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
431 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
432
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000433- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
434 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
435
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000436- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
437 constant.
438
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000439- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
440 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
441 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
442 large), and to anomalies such as
443 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
444 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
445 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
446 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000447
448Extension modules
449-----------------
450
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000451- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
452 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000453 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
454 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
455 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000456
457Library
458-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000459
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000460- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000461 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000462 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
463 --swig-cpp.
464
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000465- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
466 it is set.
467
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000468- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000469
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000470- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
471 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
472 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
473 Closes bug #1039270.
474
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000475- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000476
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000477 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000478 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
479 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
480 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
481 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
482 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
483 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
484 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
485 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
486 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
487 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
488 + Updates to documentation.
489
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000490- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
491 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
492 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
493 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
494
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000495- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000496
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000497- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
498 applications should use the getmember function.
499
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000500- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
501
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000502- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
503 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
504 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
505 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
506 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
507 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
508 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
509 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
510 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
511
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000512- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
513 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000514 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000515
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000516- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
517 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
518 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
519 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
520 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
521 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
522 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
523 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000524
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000525- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
526 the new public features (of which there are many).
527
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000528- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000529 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
530 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
531 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
532 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000533 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000534
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000535- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
536
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000537- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
538 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
539 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
540 options.
541
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000542- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
543 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
544 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
545 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
546 conditions under which non-string values work.
547
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000548Build
549-----
550
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000551- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
552 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
553 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
554
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000555- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
556 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
557 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
558 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
559 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000560
561C API
562-----
563
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000564- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
565 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
566
567- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
568
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000569- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
570 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
571 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
572 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
573 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
574 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
575 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
576 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
577 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
578
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000579- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
580
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000581- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
582 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
583 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000584
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000585Tests
586-----
587
588- test__locale ported to unittest
589
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000590Mac
591---
592
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000593- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
594 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
595 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000596
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000597Tools/Demos
598-----------
599
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000600- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
601 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
602 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
603 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
604 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000605
606
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000607What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
608=================================
609
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000610*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000611
612Core and builtins
613-----------------
614
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000615- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000616 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
617
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000618- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
619 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
620 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
621 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
622 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
623 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
624 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
625 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000626 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
627 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
628 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
629 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
630 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000631
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000632- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
633 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
634 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
635 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
636 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
637
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000638- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
639
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000640- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
641 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
642
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000643- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
644 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
645 modified the list.
646
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000647- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
648 functions is now writable.
649
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000650- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
651 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
652 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
653 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
654
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000655- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
656 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
657 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
658 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
659 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000660
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000661- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
662 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
663
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000664Extension modules
665-----------------
666
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000667- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
668
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000669- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
670 data.
671
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000672- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
673 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
674 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
675 supposed to have been truncated away.
676
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000677- Added socket.socketpair().
678
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000679- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
680 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
681
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000682- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000683 versions of Python, have now been removed.
684
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000685Library
686-------
687
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000688- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000689 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000690
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000691- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
692 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
693
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000694- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
695 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
696
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000697- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
698
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000699- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
700 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000701
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000702- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
703 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
704
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000705- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
706
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000707- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
708
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000709- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
710
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000711- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
712 Percivall.
713
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000714- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
715 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
716
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000717- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
718 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
719 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000720 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000721
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000722- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
723 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
724 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
725 and exponent.
726
727- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
728
729- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
730 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
731 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
732
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000733- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
734 to the readline module.
735
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000736- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000737 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
738 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000739
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000740- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
741 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
742 contains symlinks.
743
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000744- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
745 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
746
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000747- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
748 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
749 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
750
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000751- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
752 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
753 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
754 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
755 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
756 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
757 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
758 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
759 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
760 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
761 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
762 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
763 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
764
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000765- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
766
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000767Tools/Demos
768-----------
769
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000770- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
771 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
772
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000773- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
774
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000775Build
776-----
777
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000778- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
779 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
780 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
781 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
782 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
783 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
784 plans to do so.
785
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000786- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
787 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
788
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000789- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
790 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
791
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000792- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
793 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
794
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000795- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
796 GNU/k*BSD systems.
797
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000798- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
799 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
800
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000801C API
802-----
803
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000804..
805
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000806Documentation
807-------------
808
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000809- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
810 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
811
812- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
813 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
814 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000815
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000816New platforms
817-------------
818
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000819- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
820
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000821Tests
822-----
823
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000824..
825
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000826Windows
827-------
828
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000829- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
830 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
831 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
832 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
833 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
834 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
835 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
836 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
837 the problem.
838
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000839Mac
840---
841
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000842..
843
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000844
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000845What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
846=================================
847
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000848*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000849
850Core and builtins
851-----------------
852
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000853- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
854 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
855 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
856 sensitive code.
857
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000858- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000859 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000860
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000861 @staticmethod
862 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000863
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000864 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000865
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000866- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
867 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
868 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
869 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
870 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
871 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
872 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
873 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
874 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
875 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
876 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
877
878 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
879 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
880 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
881 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
882 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
883 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
884 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
885
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000886- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
887 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
888
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000889- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000890 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000891
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000892- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000893 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000894 which was missing for no apparent reason.
895
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000896- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000897 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
898 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
899
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000900- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
901 types that support garbage collection.
902
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000903- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
904
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000905- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
906 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
907 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
908 Jython.
909
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000910- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
911
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000912- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
913 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
914
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000915- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
916 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
917 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000918
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000919- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
920 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
921 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
922
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000923Extension modules
924-----------------
925
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000926- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
927
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000928Library
929-------
930
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000931- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
932 TIS-620
933
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000934- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
935 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
936 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
937 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
938 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
939 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
940 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
941 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
942 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
943 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
944
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000945- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
946
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000947- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
948 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
949 same as when the argument is omitted).
950 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
951
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000952- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
953
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000954- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
955 schemes are offered.
956
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000957- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
958
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000959- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
960 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
961 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
962
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000963- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
964
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000965- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
966 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
967
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000968- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
969 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
970 when dummy_threading is being used.
971
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000972- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
973 from a tarfile.
974
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000975- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000976 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000977
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000978- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
979 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
980 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
981 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
982
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000983- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
984 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
985
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000986- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
987 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
988 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
989 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
990 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
991 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
992 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
993 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
994 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
995 by some other method in progress).
996
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000997- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
998 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
999 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001000
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001001- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1002
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001003- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1004 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1005 AM Kuchling.
1006
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001007- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1008 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1009 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1010
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001011- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1012 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1013 instead of unsigned.
1014
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001015- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001016 no longer part of the public API.
1017
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001018- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1019 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1020 string methods of the same name).
1021
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001022- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001023 SF patch 945642.
1024
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001025- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1026
1027 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1028
1029 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1030 DocTestSuites.
1031
1032- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1033 that provide thread-local data.
1034
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001035- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1036 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1037
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001038- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1039
1040- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1041 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1042 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1043
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001044- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1045
1046 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1047 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1048 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001049
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001050 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1051 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1052 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1053 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1054
1055 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1056 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1057
1058 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1059 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1060 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1061 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1062
1063 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1064 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1065 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1066 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1067 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1068
1069 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1070 wrapping help output.
1071
1072 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1073 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1074 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001075
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001076C API
1077-----
1078
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001079- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1080 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1081 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1082 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1083 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1084 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1085 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1086 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1087 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1088 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1089 its visible semantics have not changed.
1090
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001091- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1092 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1093
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001094Documentation
1095-------------
1096
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001097- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001098
1099 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001100 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001101
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001102 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001103
1104 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1105
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001106- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001107
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001108Tests
1109-----
1110
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001111- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001112 platforms that use the Makefile.
1113
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001114- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1115 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1116 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1117
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001118
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001119What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1120=================================
1121
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001122*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001123
1124Core and builtins
1125-----------------
1126
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001127- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1128 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1129 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1130 objects now (one object instead of three).
1131
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001132- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1133 Windows DLLs.
1134
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001135- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1136 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001137
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001138- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1139 a new .pyc magic.
1140
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001141- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1142 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1143 be there.
1144
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001145- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1146 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1147 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1148
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001149- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1150 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1151 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1152
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001153- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1154
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001155- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1156 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1157 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001158
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001159- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1160 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1161
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001162- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1163
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001164- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001165 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001166
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001167- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1168
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001169- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1170
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001171- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1172 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1173
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001174- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1175 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1176 Fixes bug #858016 .
1177
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001178- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1179 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1180 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1181
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001182- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1183 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1184 improves their performance (about 35%).
1185
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001186- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1187 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1188 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1189
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001190- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1191 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1192 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1193 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1194
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001195- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1196 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1197 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1198 length is not known).
1199
1200- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1201 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001202 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1203 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001204 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1205
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001206- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1207 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1208
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001209- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1210 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1211 keyword arguments.
1212
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001213- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1214 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1215 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1216
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001217- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1218 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1219 cases.
1220
1221- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1222 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1223 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1224 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1225 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1226 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1227 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1228 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1229 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1230 a release build.
1231
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001232- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1233 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1234
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001235- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001236 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001237
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001238- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1239 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1240 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1241 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1242 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1243 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1244 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1245 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1246 destroyed.
1247
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001248- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1249 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1250 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1251 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1252 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1253 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1254 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1255 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1256
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001257- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1258 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1259 character other than a space.
1260
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001261- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1262 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1263 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1264 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1265 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1266 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1267 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1268 attributes with the same name.
1269
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001270- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1271 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1272 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1273 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1274 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1275 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1276 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1277 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1278 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1279 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1280 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1281 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1282 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1283 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001284
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001285- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1286 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1287 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1288 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1289 This has been repaired.
1290
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001291- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1292
1293- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1294
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001295- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1296 over a sequence.
1297
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001298- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001299 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001300
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001301- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1302
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001303- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1304 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1305 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1306 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1307 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1308 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1309 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1310 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1311
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001312- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1313 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1314 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1315
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001316- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1317 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1318 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1319 freelist.
1320
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001321- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1322 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1323
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001324- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1325 number.
1326
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001327- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1328 a TypeError exception.
1329
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001330- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1331 820195.
1332
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001333- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1334 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1335 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1336
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001337- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001338 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1339 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001340
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001341- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1342 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1343 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1344
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001345- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1346 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001347 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001348
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001349- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001350 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1351 the first call.
1352
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001353
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001354Extension modules
1355-----------------
1356
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001357- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1358 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1359
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001360- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1361 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1362 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1363 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1364 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1365 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1366 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001367
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001368- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1369
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001370- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1371
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001372- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1373 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1374
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001375- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1376 fewer false positives.
1377
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001378- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1379 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1380
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001381- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001382 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1383
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001384- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001385 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001386 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001387 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1388 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001389
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001390- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1391 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1392 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1393 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1394
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001395- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1396 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1397 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1398 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1399 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1400 #897625.
1401
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001402- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1403 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1404
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001405- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1406 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1407 and pops on either side of the deque.
1408
1409- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1410 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1411
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001412- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1413 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1414 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1415 other functions that expect a function argument.
1416
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001417- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1418
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001419- os.getsid was added.
1420
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001421- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1422 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1423 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1424
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001425- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1426
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001427- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1428
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001429- readline.clear_history was added.
1430
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001431- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1432
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001433- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1434
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001435- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1436
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001437- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1438
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001439- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1440
1441- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1442
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001443- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1444
1445- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1446
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001447- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1448 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1449 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1450
1451- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1452 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1453 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1454 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1455 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1456 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1457 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1458
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001459- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1460 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1461 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1462 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001463
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001464- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001465 iterators from a single iterable.
1466
1467- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1468 of raising a TypeError exception.
1469
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001470- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1471 as parameter.
1472
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001473Library
1474-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001475
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001476- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1477 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1478 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001479
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001480- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1481 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1482 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001483
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001484- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001485
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001486- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1487 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001488
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001489- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1490 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1491
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001492- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1493
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001494- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001495 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001496
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001497- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001498 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001499
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001500- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1501
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001502- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1503 on cygwin and mingw32.
1504
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001505- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1506
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001507- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1508 module.
1509
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001510- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1511 installation scheme for all platforms.
1512
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001513- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001514 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001515
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001516- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1517 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1518 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1519
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001520- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1521 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1522 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1523
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001524- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1525
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001526- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1527
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001528- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1529 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1530
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001531- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1532 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1533 type pattern with the same value exists.
1534
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001535- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1536 when run from the command prompt).
1537
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001538- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1539 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1540
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001541- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1542 default sort).
1543
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001544- Added global runctx function to profile module
1545
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001546- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1547
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001548- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1549
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001550- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1551
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001552- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001553 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1554 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1555 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1556 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1557 accordingly.
1558
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001559- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1560 decoding standards.
1561
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001562- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1563 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1564 called for all requests.
1565
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001566- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1567 they are passed to the compiler.
1568
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001569- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1570 indent, width and depth.
1571
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001572- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1573 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1574
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001575- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1576 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1577
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001578- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1579
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001580- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1581
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001582- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1583
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001584- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1585 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1586
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001587- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001588 for better performance.
1589
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001590- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001591
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001592- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1593 a string).
1594
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001595- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1596
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001597- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1598
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001599- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1600
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001601- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1602
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001603- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1604 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1605 list of fieldnames.
1606
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001607- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1608 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1609
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001610- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1611
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001612- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1613 empty lists.
1614
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001615- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1616 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1617 and shelves.
1618
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001619- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1620 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1621
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001622- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001623 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1624 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001625
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001626- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1627 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001628 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001629
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001630- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001631 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1632 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1633
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001634- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1635 and removed in Py2.4.
1636
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001637- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1638
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001639- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1640
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001641Tools/Demos
1642-----------
1643
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001644- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1645 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1646
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001647- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1648
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001649- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1650 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1651 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1652 destination in situations where both files are given.
1653
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001654- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1655 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1656 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1657 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1658
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001659- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1660
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001661- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1662 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1663 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1664 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1665 now.
1666
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001667- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1668 in effect
1669
1670- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1671 C-c C-h
1672
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001673- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1674 -d option was given.
1675
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001676Build
1677-----
1678
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001679- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1680 build under OS X.
1681
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001682- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1683 --enable-profiling.
1684
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001685- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1686 is configured --with-tsc.
1687
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001688- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1689 on AMD64.
1690
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001691- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1692 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1693
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001694- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1695 removed.
1696
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001697- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1698 supported (see PEP 11).
1699
1700- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1701
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001702- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1703
1704- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1705 (see PEP 11).
1706
1707- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1708 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1709
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001710C API
1711-----
1712
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001713- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1714 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1715 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1716
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001717- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1718 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1719 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1720 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1721
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001722- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1723 generator objects.
1724
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001725- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1726 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001727 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1728 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001729
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001730- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1731 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1732
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001733- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1734 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1735 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1736 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1737 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1738
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001739- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1740 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1741 about 10% faster.
1742
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001743- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1744 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1745
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001746- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1747 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1748 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1749 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1750
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001751Windows
1752-------
1753
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001754- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1755 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1756 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1757 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1758
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001759- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1760 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1761 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1762
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001763
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001764What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1765===============================
1766
1767*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1768
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001769IDLE
1770----
1771
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001772- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1773 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1774 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1775 context-menu actions.
1776
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001777- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1778 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1779 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1780 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1781 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1782 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1783 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1784 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1785 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1786
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001787
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001788What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1789=============================================
1790
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001791*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001792
1793Core and builtins
1794-----------------
1795
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001796- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001797 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001798 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1799
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001800Extension modules
1801-----------------
1802
1803- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1804 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1805 than once. This has been fixed.
1806
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001807- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1808 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1809 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1810 call.
1811
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001812- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1813
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001814Library
1815-------
1816
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001817- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1818 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1819
1820- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1821 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1822 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1823 restored.
1824
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001825IDLE
1826----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001827
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001828- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001829
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001830Build
1831-----
1832
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001833- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1834 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1835
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001836C API
1837-----
1838
1839Windows
1840-------
1841
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001842- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1843 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1844
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001845- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1846
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001847Mac
1848---
1849
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001850- Various fixes to pimp.
1851
1852- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1853
1854- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1855 more problems than it solves.
1856
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001857
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001858What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1859=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001860
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001861*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1862
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001863Core and builtins
1864-----------------
1865
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001866- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1867 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1868
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001869- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1870 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001871 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001872
1873- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1874 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1875 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001876 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001877
1878- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1879 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001880
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001881- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1882 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1883 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1884
1885- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001886 770247.
1887
1888- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001889
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001890Extension modules
1891-----------------
1892
1893- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1894 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1895
1896- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1897
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001898- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1899
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001900- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1901 contained within the _strptime module.
1902
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001903- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1904 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1905
1906- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001907 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1908
1909- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1910 the find_class attribute, if present.
1911
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001912- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001913
1914 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1915 (SF bug 763298).
1916
1917 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001918 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1919 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1920 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001921
1922 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1923
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001924Library
1925-------
1926
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001927- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1928
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001929- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1930 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1931 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1932 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1933 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1934 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1935 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1936 or Tester().
1937
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001938- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1939 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1940 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1941 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1942 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1943 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1944 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1945 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1946 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001947
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001948 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001949
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001950- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1951 weren't before was an oversight.
1952
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001953- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1954 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1955
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001956- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1957 when there are no lines.
1958
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001959- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1960 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1961
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001962- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1963 to child processes.
1964
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001965- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1966
1967- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1968
1969- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1970 xmlrpclib.
1971
1972- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1973 responses.
1974
1975- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1976 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1977
1978- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1979 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1980 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1981
1982- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1983 used as patterns.
1984
1985- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1986 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1987 than Tk 8.3.
1988
1989- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1990
1991- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001992
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001993Tools/Demos
1994-----------
1995
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001996- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1997
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001998- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1999
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002000- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002001
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002002Build
2003-----
2004
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002005- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2006
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002007- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2008
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002009- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2010 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002011
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002012- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2013 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2014 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002015
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002016C API
2017-----
2018
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002019- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2020 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2021
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002022Windows
2023-------
2024
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002025- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2026 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2027 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2028 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2029 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2030 Python exception ::
2031
2032 thread.error: can't start new thread
2033
2034 is raised now.
2035
2036- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2037 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2038 instead of from DLL teardown.
2039
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002040Mac
2041---
2042
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002043- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002044 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002045 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2046 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2047 the executable in the bundle.
2048
2049- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002050
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002051- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2052
2053- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2054 on Panther.
2055
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002056What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2057================================
2058
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002059*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002060
2061Core and builtins
2062-----------------
2063
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002064- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2065 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2066 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2067 with the -i option.
2068
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002069- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2070 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2071
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002072- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2073 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2074
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002075- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2076 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2077 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2078 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2079 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2080 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2081 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2082 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2083 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2084 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2085 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2086 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2087 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002088
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002089- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2090 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2091 embedded in a lambda expression.
2092
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002093- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2094 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2095 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2096 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2097 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2098
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002099- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2100 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2101 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2102
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002103- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2104 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2105
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002106- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2107 It's writable again.
2108
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002109- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2110 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2111 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002112 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002113
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002114- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2115 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2116 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2117
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002118Extension modules
2119-----------------
2120
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002121- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2122 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2123
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002124- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2125 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2126 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2127 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2128
2129- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2130 collection.
2131
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002132- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2133 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2134 unique within a single program run.
2135
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002136- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2137 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2138
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002139- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2140 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2141
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002142- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2143 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002144
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002145- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2146
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002147- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2148 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2149
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002150- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2151 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2152 for many BSD-derived systems.
2153
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002154
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002155Library
2156-------
2157
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002158- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2159 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2160 primary ones:
2161
2162 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2163 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2164 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2165
2166 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2167 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2168 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2169 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2170 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2171 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2172
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002173- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2174 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2175 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2176 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2177 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2178 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2179 argument.
2180
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002181- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2182 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2183 in the archive.
2184
2185- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2186 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2187
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002188- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2189 569574).
2190
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002191- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2192 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2193 no more.
2194
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002195- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2196 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2197 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2198 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2199 code coverage.
2200
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002201- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2202 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2203 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002204 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2205 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002206
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002207- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2208 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2209 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002210 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002211
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002212- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2213
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002214- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2215 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2216 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2217 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2218
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002219- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2220 handling.
2221
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002222- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2223 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2224
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002225- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2226 in socket.py.
2227
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002228- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2229
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002230- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2231 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2232 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2233 opener with proxy support.
2234
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002235- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2236
2237- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2238
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002239Tools/Demos
2240-----------
2241
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002242- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2243
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002244- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2245
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002246- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2247 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002248
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002249- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2250 files.
2251
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002252Build
2253-----
2254
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002255- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002256 different root directory.
2257
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002258C API
2259-----
2260
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002261- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2262 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2263 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2264 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2265 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2266 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2267 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2268 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2269 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2270 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2271
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002272- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2273 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2274 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2275 from Python.
2276
2277
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002278New platforms
2279-------------
2280
2281None this time.
2282
2283Tests
2284-----
2285
2286- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2287 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2288
2289Windows
2290-------
2291
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002292- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2293
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002294- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2295 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2296 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2297 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2298 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2299 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2300 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2301 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2302 that's what it's for.
2303
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002304Mac
2305---
2306
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002307- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2308 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2309 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2310 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002311- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2312 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2313- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002314
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002315SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2316------------------------------------
2317
2318430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2319598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2320622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2321661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2322683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2323697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2324713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2325724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2326727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2327729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2328730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2329731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2330732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2331733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2332735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2333740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2334744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2335745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2336747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2337749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2338751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2339753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2340755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2341757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2342760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2343
2344
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002345What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2346================================
2347
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002348*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002349
2350Core and builtins
2351-----------------
2352
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002353- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2354 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2355
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002356- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2357 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2358 and cannot be strings).
2359
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002360- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2361 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2362 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2363 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2364
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002365- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2366 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2367 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2368 Python itself.
2369
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002370- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2371 the referenced object, if it has one.
2372
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002373- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2374 the thread started at
2375 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2376
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002377- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2378 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2379 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2380 placed on a list index.
2381
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002382- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2383 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2384 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2385 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2386
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002387- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2388 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2389 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2390 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2391 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2392 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2393 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2394
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002395- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2396 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2397 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2398 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2399 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2400
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002401- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2402 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002403
2404- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2405 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2406 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2407 #693195.)
2408
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002409- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2410 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002411
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002412- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002413 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002414 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2415 interpreter executions, would fail.
2416
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002417- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002418 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002419 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002420
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002421Extension modules
2422-----------------
2423
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002424- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2425 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2426 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2427 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2428
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002429- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2430 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2431
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002432- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2433 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2434 and Greg Chapman.)
2435
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002436- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2437 recursively.
2438
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002439- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002440 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2441 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2442 leaks.
2443
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002444- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2445
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002446- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2447 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2448 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2449 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2450 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2451 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2452 #705836.
2453
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002454- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002455 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2456
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002457- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2458 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2459 See SF bug #692416.
2460
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002461- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2462 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2463
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002464- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2465 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2466 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002467
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002468- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002469 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2470 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2471
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002472- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2473 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2474 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2475 timeouts to work properly.
2476
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002477Library
2478-------
2479
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002480- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2481 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2482 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2483 future release.
2484
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002485- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2486 for querying platform dependent features.
2487
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002488- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002489
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002490- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2491 pickle protocol versions.
2492
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002493- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2494 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2495 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2496
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002497- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2498
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002499- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2500 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2501 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2502 modules.
2503
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002504- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2505 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2506 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2507
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002508- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2509 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2510
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002511- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2512 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2513 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2514
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002515- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002516 MS Office extensions.
2517
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002518- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2519 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2520
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002521- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2522 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2523
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002524- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2525 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2526 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2527 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2528 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2529 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2530
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002531- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2532 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2533 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002534
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002535- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2536 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2537 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2538
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002539- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2540
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002541- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2542 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2543 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2544
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002545Tools/Demos
2546-----------
2547
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002548- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2549 See the module docstring for details.
2550
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002551Build
2552-----
2553
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002554- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2555 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002556
2557C API
2558-----
2559
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002560- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2561
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002562- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2563 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2564 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2565
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002566- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2567 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002568
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002569 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2570 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2571 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002572
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002573- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002574 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2575
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002576- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2577 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2578 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002579
2580New platforms
2581-------------
2582
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002583None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002584
2585Tests
2586-----
2587
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002588- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2589 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002590
2591Windows
2592-------
2593
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002594- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2595 function.
2596
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002597- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2598 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002599
2600Mac
2601---
2602
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002603- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2604 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002605
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002606- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2607 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002608
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002609- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2610 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2611 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002612
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002613- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002614 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2615 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002616
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002617- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2618 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002619
2620
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002621What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2622=================================
2623
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002624*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002625
2626Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002627-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002628
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002629- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2630 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2631 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2632
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002633- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2634 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2635 (SF patch #664376.)
2636
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002637- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2638 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2639 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2640 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2641 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2642 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002643 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002644
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002645- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2646 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2647 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2648 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002649 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002650
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002651- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2652 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2653 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2654 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2655 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2656 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2657 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2658 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2659 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2660 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2661 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2662
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002663- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2664 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2665 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2666 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2667 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2668 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2669
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002670- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2671 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2672
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002673- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2674 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2675 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2676 case.)
2677
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002678- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2679 passed as unicode strings.
2680
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002681- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2682 See SF bug #683467.
2683
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002684- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2685 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2686
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002687- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2688
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002689- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2690
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002691- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2692 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2693 arguments.
2694
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002695- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2696 See SF bug #667147.
2697
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002698- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002699 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002700 See SF bug #676155.
2701
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002702- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002703 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002704 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2705 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2706 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2707 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2708 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2709 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002710
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002711Extension modules
2712-----------------
2713
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002714- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2715 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2716 tp_as_number pointer.
2717
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002718- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2719 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2720 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2721 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2722 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2723
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002724- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2725
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002726- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2727
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002728- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002729 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002730 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2731 patch #678531.)
2732
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002733- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2734 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2735
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002736- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2737 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2738
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002739- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2740
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002741- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2742 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2743 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2744
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002745- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2746
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002747- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2748 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2749
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002750- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002751
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002752- datetime changes:
2753
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002754 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2755
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002756 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2757 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2758 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2759 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2760 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2761 now.
2762
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002763 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002764 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2765 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002766
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002767 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002768 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002769 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2770 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2771 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2772 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002773
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002774 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2775 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2776 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002777 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2778
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002779 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2780 by a later example coded by Guido.
2781
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002782 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002783 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2784 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2785 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002786 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2787 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2788
2789 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2790 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2791 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2792 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2793 tzinfo subclass instance.
2794
2795 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2796 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2797 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2798 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2799 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2800 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2801 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2802 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002803
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002804 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2805 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2806 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2807 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2808 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002809 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2810
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002811 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002812
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002813 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2814 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2815 as a naive datetime object.
2816
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002817 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2818 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2819 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2820
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002821 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2822 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2823 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2824 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2825 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2826 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2827 comparison.
2828
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002829 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2830 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2831 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2832 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002833 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002834
2835 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002836
2837 and ::
2838
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002839 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2840
2841 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2842 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2843 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2844 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2845
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002846 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2847 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2848 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2849 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2850 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2851
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002852 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2853 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002854 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2855 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002856
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002857Library
2858-------
2859
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002860- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2861 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2862
2863- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2864 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2865 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2866 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2867 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2868 See PEP 307 for details.
2869
2870- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2871 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2872
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002873- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2874 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002875 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002876 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2877 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002878 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002879
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002880- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2881 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2882
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002883- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2884 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2885 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2886
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002887- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2888
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002889- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2890 exception.
2891
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002892- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2893 class.
2894
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002895- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2896 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2897 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2898
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002899- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2900 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2901
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002902- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002903 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2904 See SF bug #659228.
2905
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002906- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2907 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2908 See SF patch #651082.
2909
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002910- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002911
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002912- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2913 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2914
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002915- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002916 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002917
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002918- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2919 DOS paths from other platforms.
2920
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002921Tools/Demos
2922-----------
2923
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002924- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2925 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2926 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2927 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2928 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2929 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2930 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2931 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2932 example:
2933
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002934 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2935 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002936
2937 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2938
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002939
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002940Build
2941-----
2942
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002943- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2944 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2945 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002946 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2947
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002948 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2949
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002950- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2951 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2952 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2953 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2954 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2955 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2956 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2957 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2958 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2959
2960- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2961 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2962 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2963 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2964
2965- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2966 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2967
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002968C API
2969-----
2970
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002971- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2972 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002973
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002974- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2975 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2976 tp_as_number pointer.
2977
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002978- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2979 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2980 (SF #681367)
2981
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002982- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2983 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2984 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2985 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002986
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002987Tests
2988-----
2989
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002990- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002991 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2992 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2993 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2994 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2995 pydoc.)
2996
2997- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2998
2999- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003000
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003001Windows
3002-------
3003
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003004- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3005 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3006 time).
3007
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003008- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3009 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3010
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003011- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3012 release without strong cryptography.
3013
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003014- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003015 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003016
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003017- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3018 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3019
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003020Mac
3021---
3022
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003023- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3024 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003025
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003026- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3027 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3028 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003029
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003030- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3031 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003032
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003033- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3034 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3035 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3036 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003037
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003038- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003039 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3040 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3041 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003042
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003043
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003044What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003045=================================
3046
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003047*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003048
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003049Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003050--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003051
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003052- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3053
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003054- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3055 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003056 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003057 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003058 a different meaning than before.
3059
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003060- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003061 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003062 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003063
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003064- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003065 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003066 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003067
3068- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3069 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3070 and deallocation.
3071
3072- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3073 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3074
3075- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3076 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3077 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3078 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3079 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3080
3081- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3082 now detected by the garbage collector.
3083
3084- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3085 [SF bug 519621]
3086
3087- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3088 identifier.
3089
3090- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3091 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3092 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3093 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3094 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3095 [SF bug 563060]
3096
3097- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3098 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3099 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3100 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3101 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3102
3103- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3104 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3105 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3106
3107- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3108
3109- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3110 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3111 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3112 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3113 state of the slots would be lost.)
3114
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003115Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003116-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003117
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003118- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003119 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3120 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3121 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3122 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003123 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3124 Jython 2.1.
3125
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003126- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003127 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003128 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3129 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3130 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3131 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3132 these, see PEP 302.
3133
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003134- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3135 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3136 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3137
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003138- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3139 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3140 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3141
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003142- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3143 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3144 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3145
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003146- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3147 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3148 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3149 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3150 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3151 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3152 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3153 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3154 releases or implementations.
3155
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003156- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003157 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3158 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003159
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003160- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3161 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3162
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003163- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3164 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3165 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3166
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003167- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3168 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3169
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003170- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3171 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003172 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3173 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003174
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003175- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3176 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3177 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3178 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3179 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3180
3181 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3182 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3183 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3184 pattern.
3185
3186 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3187 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3188 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3189 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3190
3191 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3192 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3193 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3194 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3195 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3196 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3197
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003198- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3199 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3200 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3201 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3202 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3203 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3204 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3205 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003206
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003207- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3208 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3209 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3210 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3211 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003212 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3213 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3214 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3215 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3216 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3217 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3218 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003219
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003220- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3221 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3222
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003223- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3224 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3225 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3226 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3227 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3228 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3229 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3230 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3231 to Zack Weinberg!
3232
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003233- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3234 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3235 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3236 type. This has been fixed now.
3237
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003238- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3239 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3240 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3241
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003242- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3243 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3244 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3245 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3246 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3247 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3248 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3249 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003250 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003251
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003252- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3253 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3254 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003255
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003256- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3257 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3258 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3259 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3260 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3261 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3262 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3263 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003264 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003265 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3266 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3267
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003268- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3269 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3270 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3271 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3272 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3273 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3274 this.)
3275
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003276- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3277 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003278 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003279 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003280 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3281 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003282 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3283 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003284
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003285- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3286 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3287 currently running.
3288
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003289- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3290 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3291 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3292 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3293
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003294- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3295 as directory names.
3296
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003297- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3298 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3299
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003300- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3301 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3302
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003303- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003304 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3305 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003306
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003307- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3308 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3309 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3310 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3311 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3312
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003313- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3314 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3315 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3316 removed.
3317
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003318- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3319 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3320 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3321
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003322- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3323 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3324 to __debug__.
3325
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003326- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3327 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3328 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3329
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003330- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3331 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3332 deprecated now.
3333
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003334- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3335 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3336 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003337
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003338- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3339 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3340 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3341 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3342 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003343
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003344- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3345 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3346
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003347- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3348 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3349 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003350 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003351 is backward compatible.
3352
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003353- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3354 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3355 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3356 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3357 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3358
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003359- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3360 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3361 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3362 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3363 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3364 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003365
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003366- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3367 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3368
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003369- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3370 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3371
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003372- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3373 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3374 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3375 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3376 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3377
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003378- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3379 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3380 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3381
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003382- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003383 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3384
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003385- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3386 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3387 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003388
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003389- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3390 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3391
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003392- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3393 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3394 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3395
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003396- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3397
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003398Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003399-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003400
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003401- Added three operators to the operator module:
3402 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3403 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3404 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3405
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003406- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3407
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003408- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3409 archives.
3410
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003411- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3412 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3413 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3414
3415 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3416
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003417- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3418 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3419 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003420 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003421
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003422- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3423 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3424 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3425 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003426 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3427 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3428 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3429 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003430
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003431- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3432 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003433
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003434- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3435
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003436- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3437 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3438
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003439- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3440 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3441 supported.
3442
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003443- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3444
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003445- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3446 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003447
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003448- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3449 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3450
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003451- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3452
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003453- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3454 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3455
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003456- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3457 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3458 functions but callable type objects.
3459
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003460- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003461 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003462 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003463
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003464- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3465 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003466
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003467- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3468 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003469
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003470- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3471 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3472 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3473 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3474
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003475- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3476 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003477
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003478- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3479 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3480 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3481 and __imul__.
3482
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003483- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003484 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3485 is called.
3486
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003487- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3488 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3489 interpreter was compiled.
3490
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003491- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3492 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3493 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003494 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003495 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3496 1, not 2.
3497
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003498- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3499 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3500 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3501 limit.
3502
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003503- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3504 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3505 bug #623464.
3506
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003507- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3508 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3509 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3510 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3511
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003512Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003513-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003514
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003515- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3516
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003517- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3518 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3519 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3520 with Python 2.3a2.
3521
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003522- os.path exposes getctime.
3523
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003524- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003525 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003526 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003527 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003528 unit tests of floating point results.
3529
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003530- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3531 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3532 has been increased.
3533
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003534- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3535 executed.
3536
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003537- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3538 postinstallation script.
3539
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003540- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3541 test the current module.
3542
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003543- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003544 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3545 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3546 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3547 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3548
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003549- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003550 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003551 Ward's Optik package.
3552
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003553- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3554 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3555 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3556 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3557
3558- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3559 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003560 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003561
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003562- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3563 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3564 shelf are binary pickles.
3565
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003566- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3567 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3568
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003569- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3570 modules are iterators now.
3571
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003572- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3573 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3574 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3575 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3576 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3577 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003578
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003579- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3580 with their entity value.
3581
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003582- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3583
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003584- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3585 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003586
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003587- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3588 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003589 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003590
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003591- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3592 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3593 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3594 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3595 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3596 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3597 main():
3598
3599 import locale
3600 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3601
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003602- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3603 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3604
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003605- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3606 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3607 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3608 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3609 to the new standard.
3610
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003611- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3612 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3613 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3614 an extension to the database.
3615
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003616- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3617 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3618 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3619 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003620 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003621
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003622- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003623 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003624
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003625- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3626 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3627 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3628 bounded integers.
3629
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003630- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3631 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3632 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3633 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3634 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3635 in existence.
3636
3637 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3638 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3639 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3640 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3641 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3642 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3643
3644 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3645 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3646 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3647 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3648
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003649- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3650 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3651 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3652
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003653- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3654
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003655- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3656 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3657 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3658 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3659
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003660- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3661 argument.
3662
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003663- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3664 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3665 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3666 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3667 [SF patch 560794].
3668
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003669- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3670 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3671 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003672 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3673 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3674 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003675
3676- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3677 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003678
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003679- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3680 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3681 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3682 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003683
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003684- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3685 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3686 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3687 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3688 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3689
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003690- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003691
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003692- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3693
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003694- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3695 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3696 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3697 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3698 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3699 identical to None.
3700
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003701- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3702 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3703 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3704 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3705 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3706 results now.
3707
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003708- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3709 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3710
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003711- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3712 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3713 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3714 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3715 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3716 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3717 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3718 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3719
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003720- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3721
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003722- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3723 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3724
3725- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3726 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3727 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3728 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3729 and other systems.
3730
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003731- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3732 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3733 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3734 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 +00003735 work well with these.
3736
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003737- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3738
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003739- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003740 connections.
3741
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003742- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3743 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3744 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3745
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003746- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3747 sets
3748
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003749- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3750 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3751 name.
3752
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003753- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3754 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3755 passed in.
3756
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003757- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003758 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003759 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3760 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003761
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003762- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3763
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003764- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3765
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003766- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3767 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3768 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3769
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003770- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3771 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3772 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3773 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003774 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003775
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003776- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003777 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003778 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003779
3780- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3781 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3782 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3783
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003784- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003785 the value of its expression argument.
3786
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003787- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3788 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3789 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3790
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003791- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3792 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3793 skipstone browser was included.
3794
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003795- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3796 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3797
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003798Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003799-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003800
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003801- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3802 names in addition to accepting file names.
3803
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003804- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3805 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3806 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3807 still used and useful.)
3808
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003809- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3810 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3811 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3812 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003813
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003814- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3815 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3816 the generated binary.
3817
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003818Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003819-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003820
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003821- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3822
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003823- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3824 except in the hands of experts.
3825
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003826- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003827 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3828 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3829 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003830
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003831- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3832 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3833 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3834 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3835 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3836 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3837 builds.
3838
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003839- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3840 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3841 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3842 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3843 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3844 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3845 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3846 new type.
3847
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003848- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003849
3850 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3851 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3852 positive infinities.
3853
3854 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3855 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3856 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3857 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3858 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3859 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3860 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3861
3862 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3863
3864 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3865
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003866- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3867 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3868 size of the executable.
3869
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003870- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3871 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3872 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3873 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003874
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003875- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3876
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003877- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3878 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3879 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003880
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003881- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3882 well as Unix.
3883
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003884- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3885 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3886 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3887 modules in the README file for details.
3888
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003889C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003890-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003891
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003892- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3893 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003894 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003895 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003896 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003897
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003898- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3899 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3900 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3901 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3902 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3903 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003904 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003905 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3906 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3907 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3908 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3909 aligned.)
3910
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003911- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3912 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3913 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3914
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003915- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3916 level.
3917
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003918- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3919 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3920 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3921 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3922 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3923
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003924- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3925 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3926 code.
3927
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003928- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3929 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3930 adjusting for negative indices.
3931
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003932- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3933 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3934 object.
3935
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003936- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3937 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3938 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3939
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003940- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3941 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003942
3943- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3944
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003945- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3946 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3947 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3948 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3949
3950- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3951
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003952- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003953
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003954- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003955 without going through the buffer API.
3956
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003957- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003958
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003959- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3960 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3961 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3962 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3963
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003964- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3965 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3966
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003967- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003968 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3969
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003970New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003971-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003972
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003973- OpenVMS is now supported.
3974
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003975- AtheOS is now supported.
3976
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003977- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3978
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003979- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3980
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003981Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003982-----
3983
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003984- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3985 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3986 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003987
3988Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003989-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003990
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003991- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3992 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3993 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3994 bugs.
3995 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003996 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003997 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3998 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003999 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004000
4001- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004002 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004003
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004004- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4005 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4006
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004007- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4008 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004009 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004010 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4011
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004012- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4013 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4014 use files" uninstall option).
4015
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004016- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4017
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004018- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4019 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4020
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004021- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4022 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4023 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4024
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004025- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4026 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4027 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4028 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4029 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004030 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4031 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4032 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004033
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004034- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004035 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004036 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4037 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4038 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4039 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4040 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4041 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4042 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4043 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4044 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4045 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4046 work around.
4047
4048- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4049 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4050 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4051 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4052 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4053 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4054 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4055 specified with O_CREAT too).
4056
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004057Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004058----
4059
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004060- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004061
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004062- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4063 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4064 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4065
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004066- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4067 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4068 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4069
4070- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4071 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4072 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4073 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4074 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4075 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4076 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4077 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004078
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004079- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4080 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4081 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004082
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004083- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4084 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4085 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4086 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4087 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004088
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004089- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4090 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4091 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004092
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004093- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4094 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004095
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004096- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4097 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4098 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4099 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4100 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004101
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004102- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4103 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4104 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4105
4106- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4107 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4108 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004109
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004110- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4111 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4112 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4113 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004114 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004115
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004116- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4117 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004118
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004119- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4120 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004121
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004122- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004123 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004124 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4125 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004126
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004127
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004128What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004129===============================
4130
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004131*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4132
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004133Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004134--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004135
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004136- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4137 with a custom metaclass.
4138
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004139Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004140-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004141
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004142- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4143 are proxies.
4144
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004145Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004146-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004147
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004148- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4149 very short strings.
4150
4151- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4152 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4153 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4154 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4155 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4156
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004157Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004158-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004159
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004160- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4161 close or delete time).
4162
4163- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4164 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4165
4166- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4167
4168- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004169 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004170
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004171Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004172-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004173
4174Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004175-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004176
4177C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004178-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004179
4180New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004181-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004182
4183Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004184-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004185
4186Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004187-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004188
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004189- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4190
4191- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4192 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4193
4194- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4195 deleted at process exit time.
4196
4197- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4198 in backslash.
4199
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004200Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004201----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004202
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004203- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4204 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4205 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4206
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004207
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004208What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004209===========================
4210
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004211*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4212
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004213Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004214--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004215
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004216- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4217 been extensively updated. See
4218
4219 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4220
4221 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4222
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004223- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4224 deleted!
4225
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004226- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4227 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4228 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4229 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4230 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4231
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004232- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4233
4234 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4235 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4236
4237 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4238 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4239 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4240 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4241 supported anyway.
4242
4243 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4244 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4245
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004246- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4247 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4248 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4249 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4250 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004251
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004252- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4253 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4254 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4255
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004256Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004257-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004258
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004259- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4260 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4261 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4262 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4263 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4264 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004265 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4266 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4267 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4268 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004269
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004270- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4271 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4272 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4273
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004274Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004275-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004276
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004277- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4278
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004279Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004280-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004281
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004282- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4283 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4284 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4285 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4286 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4287 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4288
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004289- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4290
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004291- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4292
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004293- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4294
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004295- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4296 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4297 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4298
4299- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4300
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004301Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004302-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004303
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004304- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4305 off a search on Google.
4306
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004307Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004308-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004309
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004310- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4311 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4312 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4313 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4314 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4315 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4316 other platforms should do likewise.
4317
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004318- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4319 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4320 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4321
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004322C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004323-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004324
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004325- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4326 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4327 producing key-value pairs.
4328
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004329- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004330 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004331 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4332 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4333 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4334 previously went unchallenged.
4335
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004336New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004337-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004338
4339Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004340-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004341
4342Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004343-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004344
4345Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004346----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004347
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004348- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4349 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004350
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004351- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4352 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4353 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4354 home.
4355
4356
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004357What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004358===========================
4359
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004360*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4361
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004362Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004363--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004364
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004365- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4366 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004367
4368 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004369 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004370
4371 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4372 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004373 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004374 This needs to be documented.
4375
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004376- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4377 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4378
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004379- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4380 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4381 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4382
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004383- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4384 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4385
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004386- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4387 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4388 class forbids it).
4389
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004390- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4391 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4392 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4393
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004394- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4395
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004396Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004397-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004398
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004399- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4400 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004401 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004402
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004403- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4404 (like 1 + '').
4405
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004406Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004407-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004408
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004409- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4410 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4411 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4412 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004413 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004414 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4415
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004416- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4417 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4418 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4419 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4420
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004421- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4422 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004423 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4424 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4425 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004426
4427- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4428 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004429
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004430- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4431 bytes on its input.
4432
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004433Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004434-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004435
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004436- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004437 convenience function.
4438
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004439- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4440 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4441 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004442 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4443 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4444 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4445 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4446 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4447 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004448
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004449- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4450 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4451 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4452 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4453
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004454- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4455 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4456 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4457
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004458- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4459 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4460 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4461 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4462
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004463- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4464 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004465 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004466 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4467 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4468 new -l and -e options.
4469
4470- statcache is now deprecated.
4471
4472- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4473 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004474 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004475 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4476 time properly taken into account.
4477
4478- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4479 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4480 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4481 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4482
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004483Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004484-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004485
4486Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004487-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004488
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004489- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4490 is built with libdb3 if available.
4491
4492- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4493
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004494C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004495-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004496
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004497- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4498 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4499 PySequence_Size().
4500
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004501- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4502
4503- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4504 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4505 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4506
4507- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4508 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4509
4510- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4511 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4512
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004513New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004514-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004515
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004516- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4517 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4518
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004519- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4520 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4521
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004522- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4523
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004524Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004525-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004526
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004527- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4528 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4529
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004530Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004531-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004532
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004533Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004534----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004535
4536- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4537 removed completely in the next release.
4538
4539- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4540 OSX.
4541
4542- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4543 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4544
4545- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4546
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004547
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004548What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004549===========================
4550
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004551*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4552
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004553Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004554--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004555
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004556- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004557 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004558 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004559 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4560 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004561 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4562 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004563 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4564 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004565
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004566- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4567 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4568
4569- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4570 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4571
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004572Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004573-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004574
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004575- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4576 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4577 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4578 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4579 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4580 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4581 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4582 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4583
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004584- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4585 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4586 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4587 example).
4588
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004589- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004590 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004591 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004592 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004593
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004594- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4595 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4596 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004597 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004598
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004599- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4600 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4601 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4602 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4603 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4604 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4605
4606 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4607
4608 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4609
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004610Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004611-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004612
4613- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4614
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004615- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4616
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004617- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4618 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004619
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004620- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4621 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4622 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4623 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4624 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4625 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004626 attributes.
4627
4628- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4629 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4630 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004631
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004632- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4633 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4634 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004635
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004636- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4637 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4638 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004639 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4640 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4641
4642- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4643 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004644
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004645Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004646-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004647
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004648- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4649 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4650
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004651- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4652 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4653 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4654 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4655
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004656- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4657 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4658 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4659 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4660
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004661 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4662 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4663 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4664 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4665 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4666 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4667 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4668 without losing information).
4669
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004670- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004671 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4672 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4673 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4674 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4675 module).
4676
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004677 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004678 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4679 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4680 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4681 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004682
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004683- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004684 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4685 encoding.
4686
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004687- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4688 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4689
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004690- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004691 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4692
4693- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4694 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4695 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4696 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4697
4698- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4699
4700- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4701 ON, and OFF.
4702
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004703- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4704 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4705
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004706Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004707-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004708
4709- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4710 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4711 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004712
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004713- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4714 been added: -X and -E.
4715
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004716Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004717-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004718
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004719- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4720 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4721
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004722C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004723-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004724
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004725- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4726 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4727 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4728 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4729 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4730
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004731- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4732 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4733 as long) arguments.
4734
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004735- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4736 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4737 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4738 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4739 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4740 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4741
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004742- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4743 input.
4744
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004745New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004746-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004747
4748Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004749-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004750
4751Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004752-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004753
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004754- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4755 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4756 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4757
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004758- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4759 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4760 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004761 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004762
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004763 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4764 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4765 import signal
4766 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004767
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004768 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004769 while 1:
4770 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004771 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004772 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4773 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4774 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4775 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004776
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004777
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004778What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4779===========================
4780
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004781*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4782
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004783Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004784--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004785
4786- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4787 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4788 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4789
4790- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4791 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4792 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4793 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4794 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4795 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4796 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004797
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004798- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004799 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004800 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4801 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4802 associate a docstring with a property.
4803
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004804- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4805 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4806 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4807 other built-in object types.
4808
4809- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4810 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4811 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4812 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4813 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4814
4815- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4816 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4817
4818- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4819 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004820 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004821 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4822 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4823 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4824 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4825 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4826
4827- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4828 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4829 class.
4830
4831- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4832 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4833 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4834 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4835
4836- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4837 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4838 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4839 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4840
4841- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4842 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4843
4844- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4845 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4846 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4847 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4848 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004849 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004850 with the same value as s.
4851
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004852- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4853
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004854Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004855----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004856
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004857- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4858
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004859- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4860 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4861 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4862 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4863 objects.
4864
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004865- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4866 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004867 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4868 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4869
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004870- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4871 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4872 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4873
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004874Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004875-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004876
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004877- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4878 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4879 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4880 by the instances.
4881
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004882- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4883 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4884 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4885
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004886- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4887 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4888 before the entire comparison is complete.
4889
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004890- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4891 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4892 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4893
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004894- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4895 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4896 getwriter().
4897
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004898- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4899 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4900
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004901- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004902 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4903 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4904
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004905- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4906 iterable object.
4907
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004908- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4909 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004910
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004911- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4912 authentication.
4913
4914- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4915 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004916
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004917- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004918 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4919 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4920 a sample driver.)
4921
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004922Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004923-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004924
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004925- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4926 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4927 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4928 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4929 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4930 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4931 kernel has large file support.
4932
4933- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4934 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4935 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4936 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4937 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4938
4939- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4940 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4941 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4942
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004943C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004944-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004945
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004946- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4947 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4948
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004949New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004950-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004951
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004952- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4953 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4954
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004955Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004956-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004957
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004958- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4959 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4960 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4961 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4962 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4963
4964- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4965 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4966 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4967 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4968
4969- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4970 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4971
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004972Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004973-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004974
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004975- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004976 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4977 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004978
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004979
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004980What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4981===========================
4982
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004983*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4984
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004985Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004986----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004987
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004988- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4989 big to represent as a C double.
4990
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004991- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4992 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4993 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4994 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4995 restriction).
4996
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004997- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4998 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4999 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5000 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5001 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5002
5003 >>> dir([])
5004 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5005 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5006 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5007 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5008 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5009 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5010 'reverse', 'sort']
5011
5012 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5013
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005014- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005015 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5016 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5017 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5018 OverflowError exception.
5019
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005020- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005021 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005022 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5023 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5024 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5025 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5026 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005027 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005028 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5029 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5030
5031 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5032 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5033 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5034 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005035
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005036- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005037 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5038 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5039 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5040 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5041 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5042 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5043 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5044 once it is created.
5045
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005046- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5047 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5048 (key, value) pairs.
5049
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005050- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005051 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5052 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5053
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005054- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5055 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5056 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5057 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5058 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005059
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005060- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005061 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5062 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5063
5064 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5065
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005066- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005067 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5068
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005069Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005070-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005071
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005072- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005073 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5074 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005075
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005076- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5077 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5078 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5079 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5080 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5081 in this area anymore).
5082
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005083- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5084 threading.Timer.
5085
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005086- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5087 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5088
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005089- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005090 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5091
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005092- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005093 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5094 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5095 converted to Python longs.
5096
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005097- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005098 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5099
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005100- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5101 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5102 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5103
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005104Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005105-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005106
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005107- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5108 division operators as per PEP 238.
5109
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005110Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005111-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005112
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005113- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5114 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5115 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5116 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5117
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005118C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005119-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005120
5121- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005122
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005123- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5124 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005125 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005126
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005127 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5128 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005129 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005130 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005131
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005132- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005133 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5134 module:
5135
5136 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005137
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005138 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5139 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005140
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005141 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5142 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005143
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005144 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5145
5146 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5147
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005148- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005149 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5150 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5151 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005152
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005153New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005154-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005155
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005156- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5157 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5158 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5159 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5160 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005161
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005162Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005163-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005164
5165Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005166-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005167
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005168- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5169 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5170 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5171 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005172 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5173 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5174 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5175 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5176 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005177
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005178- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005179 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5180
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005181
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005182What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5183===========================
5184
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005185*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5186
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005187Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005188-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005189
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005190- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5191 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5192
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005193- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5194 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5195 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005196
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005197- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5198 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5199 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5200 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005201
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005202- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5203
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005204- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005205
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005206Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005207-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005208
5209- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005210 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005211 the module docstring for details.
5212
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005213Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005214-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005215
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005216- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005217 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5218 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5219 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005220
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005221- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5222 Nick Mathewson.
5223
5224Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005225----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005226
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005227- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5228 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5229 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5230 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5231 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5232 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5233 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5234 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5235
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005236- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5237 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5238 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5239 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5240
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005241- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5242 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5243 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5244 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5245 come a long way).
5246
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005247- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5248 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5249 write filters for these warnings).
5250
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005251- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5252 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5253 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5254 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5255 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5256
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005257- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5258 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5259 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5260 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5261 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5262 older distribution.
5263
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005264Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005265-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005266
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005267- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5268 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005269 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005270
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005271- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5272 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5273 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5274
5275- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5276
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005277- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5278
5279- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5280
5281- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5282
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005283- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005284
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005285- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5286
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005287New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005288-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005289
5290C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005291-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005292
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005293- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5294 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5295 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5296 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5297 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5298 against buffer overruns.
5299
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005300- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005301 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5302 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005303 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5304 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5305 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5306
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005307- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5308 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5309 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5310 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5311 deprecated.
5312
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005313Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005314-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005315
5316- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5317 relevant is found.
5318
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005319
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005320What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005321===========================
5322
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005323*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5324
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005325Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005326----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005327
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005328- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5329 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5330 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5331 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5332 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5333 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5334 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5335 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005336 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005337 repaired.
5338
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005339- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005340 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005341 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5342 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5343 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5344 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5345 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5346 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5347 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5348 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5349
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005350- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5351 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5352 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5353 leading BMO character).
5354
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005355- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5356 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5357 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5358
5359 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5360 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5361 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005362
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005363 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5364 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5365 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5366 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5367 for various simple to use conversions.
5368
5369 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5370 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5371
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005372 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5373 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5374 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5375 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5376 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5377 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5378 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5379 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5380 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5381 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5382 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5383 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5384 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5385 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5386 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005387
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005388- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5389 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5390 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005391 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005392 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005393
5394 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005395 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5396 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5397 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5398 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5399 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005400 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5401 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005402
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005403 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5404 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5405 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005406 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005407
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005408- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5409 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5410 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5411 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5412 floating arithmetic,
5413
5414 x = 9007199254740992.0
5415 print long(x)
5416
5417 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5418 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5419 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5420 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5421 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5422 functions are of good quality).
5423
5424 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5425 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5426 algorithms to break.
5427
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005428- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5429 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5430 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5431 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5432 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5433 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5434 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5435 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5436 order.
5437
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005438- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5439 operation along the most common code paths.
5440
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005441- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5442 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5443
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005444- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5445 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5446 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5447 {}.update(UserDict())
5448
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005449- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5450 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5451 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5452 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5453 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5454 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5455 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5456 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5457
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005458- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005459 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005460
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005461 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005462 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5463 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005464 join() method of strings
5465 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005466 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5467 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005468 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005469 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005470
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005471- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5472 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5473
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005474- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5475 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5476
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005477- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5478 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5479 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5480 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5481
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005482- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5483 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005484 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005485 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5486 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005487
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005488- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5489
5490
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005491Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005492-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005493
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005494- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005495 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005496 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5497 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5498
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005499- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5500 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5501
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005502- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5503 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5504 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5505 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5506
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005507- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5508 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5509 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5510
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005511- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5512
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005513- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5514
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005515- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5516 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5517 that are still imported into string.py).
5518
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005519- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5520
5521- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5522 Now it does.
5523
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005524- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5525
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005526- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5527 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5528 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5529 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5530 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005531 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5532 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005533
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005534- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5535 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5536 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5537 'help(object)'.
5538
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005539Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005540-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005541
5542- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005543 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005544 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5545 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5546
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005547- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005548 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5549 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005550
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005551C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005552-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005553
5554- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5555 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005556
5557----
5558
5559**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**