blob: 6657f3ad631f8ef56cd4c2c637e806057d6d48de [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
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Guido van Rossum9aa37ab2006-03-07 18:54:08 +000015- PEP 357, patch 1436368: add an __index__ method to int/long and a matching
16 nb_index slot to the PyNumberMethods struct. The slot is consulted instead
17 of requiring an int or long in slicing and a few other contexts, enabling
18 other objects (e.g. Numeric Python's integers) to be used as slice indices.
19
Neal Norwitz995acdf2006-03-07 05:01:00 +000020- Fixed various bugs reported by Coverity's Prevent tool.
21
Brett Cannonbf364092006-03-01 04:25:17 +000022- PEP 352, patch #1104669: Make exceptions new-style objects. Introduced the
23 new exception base class, BaseException, which has a new message attribute.
24 KeyboardInterrupt and SystemExit to directly inherit from BaseException now.
25 Raising a string exception now raises a DeprecationWarning.
26
Thomas Woutersfb609f42006-02-28 16:37:25 +000027- Patch #1438387, PEP 328: relative and absolute imports. Imports can now be
28 explicitly relative, using 'from .module import name' to mean 'from the same
29 package as this module is in. Imports without dots still default to the
30 old relative-then-absolute, unless 'from __future__ import
31 absolute_import' is used.
32
Brett Cannona7446e32006-02-27 23:39:10 +000033- Properly check if 'warnings' raises an exception (usually when a filter set
34 to "error" is triggered) when raising a warning for raising string
35 exceptions.
36
Neal Norwitz0023a2f2006-02-27 23:24:48 +000037- CO_GENERATOR_ALLOWED is no longer defined, this behavior is the default.
38 The name was removed from Include/code.h.
39
Neal Norwitzeb651252006-02-27 16:47:12 +000040- PEP 308: conditional expressions were added (x if cond else y).
41
Guido van Rossum1968ad32006-02-25 22:38:04 +000042- Patch 1433928:
43 - The copy module now "copies" function objects (as atomic objects).
44 - dict.__getitem__ now looks for a __missing__ hook before raising
45 KeyError.
46
Tim Peters84ef21c2006-02-28 20:39:06 +000047- PEP 343: with statement implemented. Needs ``from __future__ import
48 with_statement``. Use of 'with' as a variable will generate a warning.
49 Use of 'as' as a variable will also generate a warning (unless it's
Neal Norwitz055ec242006-02-28 20:06:49 +000050 part of an import statement).
Guido van Rossum1a5e21e2006-02-28 21:57:43 +000051 The following objects have __context__ methods:
52 - The built-in file type.
53 - The thread.LockType type.
54 - The following types defined by the threading module:
55 Lock, RLock, Condition, Semaphore, BoundedSemaphore.
56 - The decimal.Context class.
Guido van Rossumc2e20742006-02-27 22:32:47 +000057
Marc-André Lemburgfe4b34c2006-02-19 15:22:22 +000058- Fix the encodings package codec search function to only search
59 inside its own package. Fixes problem reported in patch #1433198.
60
61 Note: Codec packages should implement and register their own
62 codec search function. PEP 100 has the details.
63
Martin v. Löwis18e16552006-02-15 17:27:45 +000064- PEP 353: Using ssize_t as the index type.
65
Neal Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000066- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
67 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
68 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
69
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000070- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
71 configure would break checking curses.h.
72
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000073- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
74 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
75
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000076- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
77
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000078- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
79
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000080- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
81
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000082- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
83 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
84
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000085- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
Barry Warsawd3c38ff2006-03-07 09:46:03 +000086 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.subversion. Build number
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000087 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
88
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000089- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
90 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000091 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000092
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000093- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
94 now encodes backslash correctly.
95
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000096- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
97
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000098- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
99 and long longs.
100
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +0000101- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
102 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
103 message in this case.
104
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +0000105- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
106 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
107 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
108 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
109 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
110
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000111- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +0000112
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000113- Speed up some Unicode operations.
114
Martin v. Löwisbd260da2006-02-26 19:42:26 +0000115- A new AST parser implementation was completed. The abstract
116 syntax tree is available for read-only (non-compile) access
Martin v. Löwis577b5b92006-02-27 15:23:19 +0000117 to Python code; an _ast module was added.
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000118
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +0000119- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +0000120 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
121
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +0000122- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
123
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +0000124- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
125 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
126
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +0000127- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
128
129- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
130
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +0000131- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
132 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
133 was empty.
134
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +0000135- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
136 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
137
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +0000138- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +0000139 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +0000140
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +0000141- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
142 codes.
143
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +0000144- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
145 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
146 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
147
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +0000148- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
149 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
150
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +0000151- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +0000152 (fixes bug #1119418).
153
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000154- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
155
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000156- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
157 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
158
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000159- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
160 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
161 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
162
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000163- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
164
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000165- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
166 reference counts in some error exit cases.
167
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000168- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
169 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
170 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
171 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
172 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
173 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
174 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
175 realloc.
176
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000177- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
178 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
179
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000180- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
181 like their int counterparts.
182
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000183- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
184 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
185 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
186 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
187 for a longer write-up of the problem).
188
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000189- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
190 serializing floats.
191
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000192- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
193 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
194 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
195
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000196- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
197 278.
198
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000199- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
200 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
201 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
202 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000203 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000204 PyNumber_*().
205 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
206
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000207- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
208 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
209 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
210 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
211
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000212- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
213 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
214 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
215 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
216 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
217
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000218- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
219 disabled caused a crash.
220
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000221- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
222 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
223
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000224- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000225 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
226
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000227- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
228
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000229- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000230 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
231 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
232 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000233
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000234- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
235
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000236- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
237 returning None.
238
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000239- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000240 ('\') with a specific error message.
241
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000242- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
243
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000244- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
245 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
246
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000247- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000248 an ferror() call.
249
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000250- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
251 list.sort().
252
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000253- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
254 (2+3) --> (5).
255
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000256- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
257
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000258- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
259 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000260
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000261- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
262 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
263 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
264
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000265- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
266 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
267 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
268
Tim Petersf4e69282006-02-27 17:15:31 +0000269- Patch #1413181: changed ``PyThreadState_Delete()`` to forget about the
270 current thread state when the auto-GIL-state machinery knows about
271 it (since the thread state is being deleted, continuing to remember it
272 can't help, but can hurt if another thread happens to get created with
273 the same thread id).
274
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000275Extension Modules
276-----------------
277
Neal Norwitzb62c4332006-03-04 18:35:47 +0000278- The timing module is no longer built by default. It was deprecated
279 in PEP 4 in Python 2.0 or earlier.
280
Guido van Rossum1968ad32006-02-25 22:38:04 +0000281- Patch 1433928: Added a new type, defaultdict, to the collections module.
282 This uses the new __missing__ hook behavior added to dict (see above).
283
Georg Brandldbd83392006-02-20 09:42:33 +0000284- Bug #854823: socketmodule now builds on Sun platforms even when
285 INET_ADDRSTRLEN is not defined.
286
Georg Brandlf4f44152006-02-18 22:29:33 +0000287- Patch #1393157: os.startfile() now has an optional argument to specify
288 a "command verb" to invoke on the file.
289
Neal Norwitz082b2df2006-02-07 07:04:46 +0000290- Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor
291 is larger than FD_SETSIZE.
292
Neal Norwitz0e6bc8c2006-02-05 05:45:43 +0000293- Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory.
294 mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows.
295 mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory.
296
Martin v. Löwis57a34e82006-02-04 19:12:37 +0000297- Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
298 than the system default domain.
299
Martin v. Löwis14694662006-02-03 12:54:16 +0000300- Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
301 are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
302 WindowsError now (instead of OSError).
303
Gregory P. Smithcfc4a8d2006-01-29 19:46:23 +0000304- Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.
305
Neal Norwitz62a21122006-01-25 05:21:55 +0000306- Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
307 before the env.
308
Martin v. Löwis11017b12006-01-14 18:12:57 +0000309- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
310
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000311- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
312
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000313- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
314 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
315 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
316
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000317- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
318 without prior setting of the userptr.
319
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000320- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
321
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000322- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
323
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000324- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
325 problem on AIX.
326
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000327- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
328
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000329- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
330
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000331- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
332
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000333- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
334 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
335
Gregory P. Smithe101df92006-01-24 20:09:45 +0000336- Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
337 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
338
339- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
340
341- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000342
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000343- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
344 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
345
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000346- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
347
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000348- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
349 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
350
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000351- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
352 returns in cStringIO.c.
353
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000354- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
355 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
356
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000357- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
358
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000359- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
360
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000361- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
362 the file system encoding.
363
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000364- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
365 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000366
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000367- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
368
369- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000370 line without newlines.
371
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000372- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
373 on Windows.
374
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000375- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000376 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
377
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000378- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
379 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
380 for large or negative values.
381
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000382- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000383 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000384
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000385- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
386
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000387- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
388 if available on the platform.
389
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000390- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
391 available on the platform.
392
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000393- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
394 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
395
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000396- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
397
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000398- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
399 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
400 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
401
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000402- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
403
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000404- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
405 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
406
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000407- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000408 file size.
409
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000410- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
411
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000412- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
413 {remove_history,replace_history}
414
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000415- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
416 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000417
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000418- stat_float_times is now True.
419
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000420- array.array objects are now picklable.
421
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000422- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
423 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
424
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000425- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
426 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
427 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
428
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000429- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
430 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000431
432Library
433-------
434
Barry Warsawd3c38ff2006-03-07 09:46:03 +0000435- The function get_count() has been added to the gc module, and gc.collect()
436 grew an optional 'generation' argument.
437
Martin v. Löwisfbab90e2006-03-05 13:36:04 +0000438- A library msilib to generate Windows Installer files, and a distutils
439 command bdist_msi have been added.
440
Guido van Rossum1a5e21e2006-02-28 21:57:43 +0000441- PEP 343: new module contextlib.py defines decorator @contextmanager
442 and helpful context managers nested() and closing().
443
Martin v. Löwis415ed932006-02-27 19:56:30 +0000444- The compiler package now supports future imports after the module docstring.
445
Georg Brandl8f7c54e2006-02-20 08:40:38 +0000446- Bug #1413790: zipfile now sanitizes absolute archive names that are
447 not allowed by the specs.
448
Georg Brandlc98eeed2006-02-19 14:57:47 +0000449- Patch #1215184: FileInput now can be given an opening hook which can
450 be used to control how files are opened.
451
Georg Brandlc029f872006-02-19 14:12:34 +0000452- Patch #1212287: fileinput.input() now has a mode parameter for
453 specifying the file mode input files should be opened with.
454
Georg Brandl67e9fb92006-02-19 13:56:17 +0000455- Patch #1215184: fileinput now has a fileno() function for getting the
456 current file number.
457
Georg Brandl602b9ba2006-02-19 13:26:36 +0000458- Patch #1349274: gettext.install() now optionally installs additional
459 translation functions other than _() in the builtin namespace.
460
Georg Brandle4662172006-02-19 09:51:27 +0000461- Patch #1337756: fileinput now accepts Unicode filenames.
462
Georg Brandl7b4e7c22006-02-18 21:10:56 +0000463- Patch #1373643: The chunk module can now read chunks larger than
464 two gigabytes.
465
Georg Brandl21dd1af2006-02-17 13:35:13 +0000466- Patch #1417555: SimpleHTTPServer now returns Last-Modified headers.
467
Georg Brandlbd3bc4d2006-02-17 09:52:53 +0000468- Bug #1430298: It is now possible to send a mail with an empty
469 return address using smtplib.
470
Georg Brandl0e1abe22006-02-17 09:48:14 +0000471- Bug #1432260: The names of lambda functions are now properly displayed
472 in pydoc.
Georg Brandl501dd0d2006-02-17 09:45:40 +0000473
Martin v. Löwis00756902006-02-05 17:09:41 +0000474- Patch #1412872: zipfile now sets the creator system to 3 (Unix)
475 unless the system is Win32.
476
Tim Petersda1329b2006-02-27 16:50:01 +0000477- Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy
Martin v. Löwis3e865952006-01-24 15:51:21 +0000478 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
479 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
480
Georg Brandl531ceba2006-01-21 07:20:56 +0000481- Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
482
483- Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
Georg Brandl89f35ac2006-01-20 17:24:23 +0000484
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000485- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
486
Neal Norwitzf60cd472006-01-14 07:05:13 +0000487- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
Georg Brandl45ab2332006-01-13 17:05:56 +0000488 any more.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000489
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000490- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
491 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000492
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000493- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
494
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000495- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
496
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000497- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
498 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
499 LoadError subclasses IOError.
500
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000501- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000502 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
503 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
504 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
505 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
506
507 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
508 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
509 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
510 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
511 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000512
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000513- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
514 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
515 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
516
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000517- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
518
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000519- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
520
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000521- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
522 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
523 illegal argument)
524
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000525- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
526 is an error in the format string.
527
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000528- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
529
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000530- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000531 "parent" argument.
532
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000533- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
534 for padding.
535
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000536- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
537 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
538
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000539- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
540 to get the correct encoding.
541
542- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
543 languages.
544
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000545- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
546
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000547- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
548
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000549- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
550
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000551- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
552 functionality.
553
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000554- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
555
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000556- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
557 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
558
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000559- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
560 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
561 match the Content-Length header.
562
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000563- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
564
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000565- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
566 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000567 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000568
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000569- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
570
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000571- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
572
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000573- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
574 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
575
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000576- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
577 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
578 Tkdnd.
579
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000580- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
581 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
582
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000583- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
584 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
585
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000586- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000587 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
588
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000589- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
590 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
591
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000592- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
593 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
594
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000595- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000596 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000597
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000598- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
599
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000600- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
601 error messages.
602
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000603- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
604
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000605- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
606 Bug #1224621.
607
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000608- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
609 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
610 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
611 terminates by raising StopIteration.
612
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000613- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
614
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000615- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
616 component of the path.
617
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000618- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
619 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
620 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
621 class at all.
622
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000623- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
624 files to PyPI.
625
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000626- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
627 them to PyPI.
628
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000629- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
630 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
631 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
632 work as expected.
633
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000634- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
635 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
636
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000637- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000638 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
639
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000640- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
641
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000642- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
643 to build.
644
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000645- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
646 symbolic links on Windows.
647
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000648- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000649 profile.py if available.
650
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000651- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
652
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000653- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
654 in LWPCookieJar.
655
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000656- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
657
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000658- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
659
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000660- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
661
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000662- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
663
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000664- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
665
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000666- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
667
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000668- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
669
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000670- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
671
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000672- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
673 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
674 be exploited in various ways.
675
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000676- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000677 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
678
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000679- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
680 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
681
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000682- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000683 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
684
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000685- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
686
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000687- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
688
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000689- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
690
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000691- Enhancements to the csv module:
692
693 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000694 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000695 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000696 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
697 reporting.
698 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
699 dictates.
700 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000701 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000702 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000703 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
704 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000705 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
706 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000707 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000708 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
709 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
710 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
711 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
712 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
713 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
714 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
715 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
716 without first creating a dialect class.
717 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
718 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
719 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000720 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000721 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
722 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000723 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
724 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
725 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
726 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000727 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
728 This has been fixed.
729
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000730- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
731 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
732 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
733 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
734
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000735- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
736
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000737- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
738 (Bug #951915).
739
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000740- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
741 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
742 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000743 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000744
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000745- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
746
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000747- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
748 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
749
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000750- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
751
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000752- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
753
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000754- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
755
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000756- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
757
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000758- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
759
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000760- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
761 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
762 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
763
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000764- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000765 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000766
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000767- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
768 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
769 tokenizer with very long source lines.
770
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000771- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
772 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
773 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000774
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000775- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
776 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000777
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000778- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
779 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
780
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000781- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
782 correctly.
783
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000784- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
785 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
786 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
787 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
788 between two lines.
789
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000790- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
791 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
792 handlers.
793
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000794- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000795 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
796 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000797
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000798- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
799 considering it exactly like a '*'.
800
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000801- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
802 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000803
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000804- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
805
Gustavo Niemeyer548148812006-01-31 18:34:13 +0000806- Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib
807 touch the recursion limit.
808
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000809Build
810-----
811
Martin v. Löwis86d66262006-02-17 08:40:11 +0000812- Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly.
813
Martin v. Löwis856bf9a2006-02-14 20:42:55 +0000814- Build support for Win64-AMD64 was added.
815
Martin v. Löwisa55e55e2006-02-11 15:55:14 +0000816- Patch #1428494: Prefer linking against ncursesw over ncurses library.
817
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000818- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
819
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000820- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
821 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
822
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000823- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
824
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000825- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
826 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
827
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000828- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
829 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
830
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000831- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
832 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
833 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000834 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000835
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000836- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
837 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
838 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
839
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000840- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
841
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000842- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
843 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
844
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000845- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
846 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
847 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
848 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
849 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
850 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
851 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
852 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
853
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000854- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
855 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
856 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
857 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
858
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000859C API
860-----
861
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000862- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
863
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000864- Removed PyRange_New().
865
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000866- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
867 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
868 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
869 mappings.
870
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000871
872Tests
873-----
874
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000875- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000876
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000877- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
878 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
879
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000880
881Documentation
882-------------
883
Georg Brandl8cb30772006-01-20 09:34:29 +0000884- Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
885
Georg Brandla3a93ae2006-01-20 09:14:36 +0000886- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
887 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
888
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000889- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
890
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000891- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
892
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000893- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
894
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000895- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
896
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000897- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
898
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000899- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
900
901- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
902
903- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
904
905- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
906
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000907- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
908 Closes bug #1166582.
909
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000910- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
911 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
912 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
913
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000914Mac
915---
916
917
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000918New platforms
919-------------
920
921- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
922
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000923
924Tools/Demos
925-----------
926
Brett Cannonacde7342006-03-01 04:28:00 +0000927- Created Misc/Vim/vim_syntax.py to auto-generate a python.vim file in that
928 directory for syntax highlighting in Vim. Vim directory was added and placed
929 vimrc to it (was previous up a level).
930
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000931- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
932 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
933 source files that need an encoding declaration.
934 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
935
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000936- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
937
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000938- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000939
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000940- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
941 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000942
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000943What's New in Python 2.4 final?
944===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000945
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000946*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000947
948Core and builtins
949-----------------
950
951- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
952 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
953 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
954
955
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000956What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
957==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000958
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000959*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000960
961Core and builtins
962-----------------
963
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000964- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
965 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
966 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
967
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000968
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000969Library
970-------
971
972- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
973 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
974 raised is re-raised.
975
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000976- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
977 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
978
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000979- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
980 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
981 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
982 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
983 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
984 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
985 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
986 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
987 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
988 by the slice are recomputed now.
989
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000990- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000991
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000992Build
993-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000994
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000995- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
996 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
997 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000998
999C API
1000-----
1001
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +00001002- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
1003
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00001004
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001005What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
1006================================
1007
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +00001008*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001009
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001010License
1011-------
1012
1013The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
1014is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
1015changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
1016Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
1017intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
1018durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
1019the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
1020License::
1021
1022 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
1023
1024says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
1025to Python 2.1.1.
1026
1027The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
1028License Version 2.
1029
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001030Core and builtins
1031-----------------
1032
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +00001033- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
1034 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
1035 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
1036 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
1037 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
1038 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
1039 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +00001040 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +00001041 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
1042 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
1043
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +00001044- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001045
1046Extension Modules
1047-----------------
1048
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +00001049- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
1050 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
1051 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
1052 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001053
1054Library
1055-------
1056
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +00001057- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
1058 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
1059 returned.
1060
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +00001061- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
1062
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +00001063- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
1064 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
1065
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +00001066- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
1067
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +00001068- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
1069 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001070
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +00001071- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
1072
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +00001073- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
1074
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001075- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +00001076 the source code is updated and reloaded.
1077
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001078Build
1079-----
1080
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001081- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001082
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001083What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
1084================================
1085
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +00001086*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001087
1088Core and builtins
1089-----------------
1090
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001091- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +00001092 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
1093
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +00001094- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
1095 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
1096 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
1097 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
1098
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001099- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
1100 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
1101
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +00001102- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
1103 constant.
1104
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001105- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
1106 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
1107 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
1108 large), and to anomalies such as
1109 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
1110 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
1111 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
1112 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001113
1114Extension modules
1115-----------------
1116
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +00001117- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
1118 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001119 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
1120 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
1121 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001122
1123Library
1124-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001125
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001126- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001127 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001128 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
1129 --swig-cpp.
1130
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +00001131- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
1132 it is set.
1133
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +00001134- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +00001135
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +00001136- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
1137 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
1138 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
1139 Closes bug #1039270.
1140
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001141- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +00001142
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +00001143 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001144 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
1145 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
1146 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
1147 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
1148 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
1149 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
1150 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
1151 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
1152 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
1153 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
1154 + Updates to documentation.
1155
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +00001156- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
1157 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
1158 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
1159 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
1160
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001161- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001162
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +00001163- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
1164 applications should use the getmember function.
1165
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +00001166- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
1167
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +00001168- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
1169 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1170 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1171 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1172 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1173 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1174 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1175 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1176 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1177
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001178- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1179 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001180 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001181
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001182- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1183 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1184 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1185 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1186 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1187 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1188 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1189 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001190
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001191- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1192 the new public features (of which there are many).
1193
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001194- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001195 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1196 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1197 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1198 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001199 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001200
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001201- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1202
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001203- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1204 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1205 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1206 options.
1207
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001208- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1209 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1210 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1211 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1212 conditions under which non-string values work.
1213
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001214Build
1215-----
1216
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001217- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1218 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1219 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1220
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001221- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1222 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1223 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1224 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1225 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001226
1227C API
1228-----
1229
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001230- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1231 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1232
1233- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1234
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001235- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1236 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1237 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1238 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1239 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1240 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1241 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1242 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1243 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1244
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001245- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1246
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001247- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1248 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1249 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001250
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001251Tests
1252-----
1253
1254- test__locale ported to unittest
1255
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001256Mac
1257---
1258
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001259- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1260 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1261 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001262
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001263Tools/Demos
1264-----------
1265
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001266- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1267 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1268 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1269 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1270 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001271
1272
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001273What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1274=================================
1275
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001276*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001277
1278Core and builtins
1279-----------------
1280
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001281- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001282 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1283
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001284- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1285 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1286 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1287 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1288 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1289 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1290 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1291 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001292 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1293 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1294 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1295 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1296 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001297
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001298- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1299 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1300 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1301 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1302 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1303
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001304- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1305
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001306- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1307 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1308
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001309- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1310 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1311 modified the list.
1312
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001313- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1314 functions is now writable.
1315
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001316- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1317 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1318 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1319 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1320
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001321- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1322 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1323 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1324 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1325 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001326
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001327- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1328 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1329
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001330Extension modules
1331-----------------
1332
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001333- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1334
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001335- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1336 data.
1337
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001338- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1339 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1340 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1341 supposed to have been truncated away.
1342
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001343- Added socket.socketpair().
1344
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001345- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1346 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1347
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001348- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001349 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1350
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001351Library
1352-------
1353
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001354- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001355 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001356
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001357- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1358 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1359
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001360- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1361 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1362
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001363- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1364
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001365- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1366 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001367
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001368- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1369 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1370
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001371- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1372
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001373- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1374
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001375- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1376
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001377- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1378 Percivall.
1379
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001380- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1381 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1382
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001383- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1384 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1385 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001386 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001387
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001388- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1389 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1390 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1391 and exponent.
1392
1393- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1394
1395- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001396 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001397 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1398
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001399- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1400 to the readline module.
1401
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001402- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001403 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1404 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001405
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001406- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1407 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1408 contains symlinks.
1409
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001410- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1411 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1412
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001413- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1414 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1415 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1416
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001417- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1418 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1419 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1420 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1421 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1422 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1423 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1424 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1425 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1426 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1427 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1428 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1429 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1430
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001431- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1432
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001433Tools/Demos
1434-----------
1435
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001436- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1437 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1438
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001439- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1440
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001441Build
1442-----
1443
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001444- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1445 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1446 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1447 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1448 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1449 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1450 plans to do so.
1451
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001452- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1453 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1454
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001455- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1456 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1457
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001458- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1459 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1460
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001461- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1462 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1463
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001464- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1465 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1466
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001467C API
1468-----
1469
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001470..
1471
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001472Documentation
1473-------------
1474
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001475- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1476 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1477
1478- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1479 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1480 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001481
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001482New platforms
1483-------------
1484
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001485- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1486
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001487Tests
1488-----
1489
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001490..
1491
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001492Windows
1493-------
1494
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001495- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1496 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1497 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1498 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1499 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1500 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1501 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1502 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1503 the problem.
1504
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001505Mac
1506---
1507
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001508..
1509
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001510
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001511What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1512=================================
1513
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001514*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001515
1516Core and builtins
1517-----------------
1518
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001519- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1520 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1521 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1522 sensitive code.
1523
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001524- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001525 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001526
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001527 @staticmethod
1528 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001529
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001530 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001531
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001532- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1533 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1534 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1535 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1536 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1537 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1538 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1539 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1540 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1541 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1542 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1543
1544 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1545 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1546 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1547 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1548 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1549 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1550 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1551
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001552- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1553 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1554
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001555- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001556 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001557
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001558- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001559 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001560 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1561
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001562- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001563 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1564 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1565
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001566- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1567 types that support garbage collection.
1568
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001569- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1570
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001571- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1572 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1573 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1574 Jython.
1575
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001576- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1577
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001578- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1579 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1580
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001581- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1582 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1583 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001584
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001585- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1586 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1587 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1588
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001589Extension modules
1590-----------------
1591
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001592- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1593
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001594Library
1595-------
1596
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001597- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1598 TIS-620
1599
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001600- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1601 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1602 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1603 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1604 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1605 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1606 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1607 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1608 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1609 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1610
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001611- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1612
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001613- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1614 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1615 same as when the argument is omitted).
1616 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1617
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001618- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1619
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001620- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1621 schemes are offered.
1622
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001623- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1624
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001625- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1626 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1627 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1628
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001629- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1630
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001631- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1632 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1633
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001634- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1635 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1636 when dummy_threading is being used.
1637
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001638- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1639 from a tarfile.
1640
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001641- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001642 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001643
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001644- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1645 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1646 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1647 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1648
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001649- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1650 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1651
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001652- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1653 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1654 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1655 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1656 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1657 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1658 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1659 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1660 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1661 by some other method in progress).
1662
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001663- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1664 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1665 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001666
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001667- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1668
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001669- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1670 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1671 AM Kuchling.
1672
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001673- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1674 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1675 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1676
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001677- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1678 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1679 instead of unsigned.
1680
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001681- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001682 no longer part of the public API.
1683
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001684- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1685 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1686 string methods of the same name).
1687
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001688- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001689 SF patch 945642.
1690
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001691- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1692
1693 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1694
1695 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1696 DocTestSuites.
1697
1698- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1699 that provide thread-local data.
1700
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001701- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1702 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1703
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001704- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1705
1706- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1707 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1708 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1709
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001710- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1711
1712 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1713 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1714 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001715
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001716 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1717 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1718 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1719 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1720
1721 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1722 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1723
1724 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1725 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1726 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1727 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1728
1729 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1730 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1731 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1732 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1733 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1734
1735 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1736 wrapping help output.
1737
1738 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1739 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1740 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001741
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001742C API
1743-----
1744
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001745- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1746 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1747 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1748 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1749 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1750 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1751 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1752 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1753 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1754 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1755 its visible semantics have not changed.
1756
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001757- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1758 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1759
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001760Documentation
1761-------------
1762
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001763- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001764
1765 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001766 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001767
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001768 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001769
1770 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1771
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001772- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001773
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001774Tests
1775-----
1776
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001777- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001778 platforms that use the Makefile.
1779
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001780- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1781 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1782 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1783
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001784
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001785What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1786=================================
1787
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001788*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001789
1790Core and builtins
1791-----------------
1792
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001793- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1794 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1795 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1796 objects now (one object instead of three).
1797
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001798- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1799 Windows DLLs.
1800
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001801- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1802 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001803
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001804- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1805 a new .pyc magic.
1806
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001807- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1808 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1809 be there.
1810
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001811- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1812 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1813 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1814
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001815- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1816 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1817 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1818
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001819- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1820
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001821- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1822 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1823 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001824
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001825- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1826 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1827
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001828- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1829
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001830- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001831 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001832
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001833- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1834
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001835- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1836
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001837- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1838 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1839
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001840- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1841 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1842 Fixes bug #858016 .
1843
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001844- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1845 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1846 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1847
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001848- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1849 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1850 improves their performance (about 35%).
1851
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001852- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1853 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1854 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1855
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001856- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1857 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1858 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1859 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1860
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001861- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1862 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001863 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001864 length is not known).
1865
1866- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1867 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001868 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1869 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001870 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1871
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001872- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1873 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1874
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001875- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1876 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1877 keyword arguments.
1878
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001879- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1880 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1881 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1882
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001883- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1884 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1885 cases.
1886
1887- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1888 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1889 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1890 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1891 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1892 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1893 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1894 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1895 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1896 a release build.
1897
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001898- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1899 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1900
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001901- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001902 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001903
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001904- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1905 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1906 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1907 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1908 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1909 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1910 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1911 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1912 destroyed.
1913
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001914- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1915 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1916 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1917 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1918 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1919 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1920 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1921 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1922
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001923- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1924 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1925 character other than a space.
1926
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001927- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1928 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1929 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1930 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1931 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1932 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1933 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1934 attributes with the same name.
1935
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001936- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1937 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1938 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1939 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1940 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1941 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1942 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1943 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1944 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1945 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1946 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1947 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1948 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1949 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001950
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001951- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1952 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1953 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1954 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1955 This has been repaired.
1956
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001957- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1958
1959- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1960
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001961- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1962 over a sequence.
1963
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001964- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001965 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001966
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001967- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1968
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001969- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1970 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1971 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1972 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1973 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1974 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1975 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1976 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1977
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001978- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1979 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1980 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1981
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001982- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1983 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1984 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1985 freelist.
1986
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001987- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1988 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1989
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001990- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1991 number.
1992
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001993- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1994 a TypeError exception.
1995
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001996- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1997 820195.
1998
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001999- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
2000 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
2001 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
2002
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002003- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00002004 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
2005 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00002006
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00002007- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
2008 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
2009 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
2010
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00002011- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
2012 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002013 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00002014
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002015- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00002016 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
2017 the first call.
2018
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00002019
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002020Extension modules
2021-----------------
2022
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00002023- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
2024 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
2025
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002026- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
2027 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
2028 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
2029 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
2030 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
2031 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
2032 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00002033
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00002034- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
2035
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00002036- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
2037
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00002038- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
2039 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
2040
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00002041- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
2042 fewer false positives.
2043
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00002044- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
2045 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
2046
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002047- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00002048 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
2049
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00002050- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002051 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00002052 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00002053 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
2054 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00002055
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00002056- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
2057 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
2058 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
2059 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
2060
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00002061- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
2062 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
2063 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
2064 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
2065 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
2066 #897625.
2067
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00002068- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
2069 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
2070
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00002071- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
2072 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
2073 and pops on either side of the deque.
2074
2075- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
2076 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
2077
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00002078- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
2079 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
2080 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
2081 other functions that expect a function argument.
2082
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00002083- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
2084
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002085- os.getsid was added.
2086
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00002087- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
2088 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
2089 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
2090
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00002091- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
2092
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00002093- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
2094
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00002095- readline.clear_history was added.
2096
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00002097- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
2098
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00002099- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
2100
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00002101- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
2102
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00002103- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
2104
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00002105- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
2106
2107- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
2108
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00002109- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
2110
2111- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
2112
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002113- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
2114 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
2115 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
2116
2117- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
2118 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
2119 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
2120 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
2121 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
2122 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
2123 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
2124
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00002125- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
2126 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
2127 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
2128 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002129
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002130- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002131 iterators from a single iterable.
2132
2133- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
2134 of raising a TypeError exception.
2135
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00002136- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
2137 as parameter.
2138
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002139Library
2140-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00002141
Armin Rigoa871ef22006-02-08 12:53:56 +00002142- Added a new module: cProfile, a C profiler with the same interface as the
2143 profile module. cProfile avoids some of the drawbacks of the hotshot
2144 profiler and provides a bit more information than the other two profilers.
2145 Based on "lsprof" (patch #1212837).
2146
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00002147- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
2148
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00002149- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
2150 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
2151 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002152
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00002153- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
2154 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
2155 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00002156
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00002157- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00002158
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00002159- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
2160 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00002161
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00002162- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
2163 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
2164
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002165- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
2166
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002167- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002168 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002169
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002170- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00002171 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002172
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00002173- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
2174
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002175- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2176 on cygwin and mingw32.
2177
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002178- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2179
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002180- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2181 module.
2182
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002183- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2184 installation scheme for all platforms.
2185
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002186- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002187 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002188
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002189- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2190 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2191 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2192
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002193- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2194 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2195 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2196
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002197- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2198
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002199- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2200
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002201- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2202 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2203
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002204- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2205 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2206 type pattern with the same value exists.
2207
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002208- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2209 when run from the command prompt).
2210
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002211- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2212 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2213
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002214- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2215 default sort).
2216
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002217- Added global runctx function to profile module
2218
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002219- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2220
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002221- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2222
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002223- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2224
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002225- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002226 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2227 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2228 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2229 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2230 accordingly.
2231
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002232- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2233 decoding standards.
2234
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002235- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2236 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2237 called for all requests.
2238
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002239- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2240 they are passed to the compiler.
2241
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002242- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2243 indent, width and depth.
2244
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002245- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2246 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2247
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002248- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2249 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2250
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002251- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2252
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002253- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2254
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002255- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2256
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002257- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2258 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2259
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002260- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002261 for better performance.
2262
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002263- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002264
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002265- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2266 a string).
2267
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002268- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2269
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002270- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2271
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002272- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2273
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002274- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2275
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002276- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2277 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2278 list of fieldnames.
2279
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002280- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2281 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2282
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002283- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2284
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002285- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2286 empty lists.
2287
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002288- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2289 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2290 and shelves.
2291
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002292- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2293 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2294
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002295- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002296 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2297 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002298
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002299- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2300 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002301 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002302
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002303- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002304 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2305 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2306
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002307- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2308 and removed in Py2.4.
2309
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002310- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2311
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002312- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2313
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002314Tools/Demos
2315-----------
2316
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002317- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2318 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2319
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002320- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2321
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002322- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2323 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2324 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2325 destination in situations where both files are given.
2326
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002327- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2328 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2329 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2330 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2331
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002332- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2333
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002334- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2335 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2336 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2337 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2338 now.
2339
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002340- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2341 in effect
2342
2343- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2344 C-c C-h
2345
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002346- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2347 -d option was given.
2348
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002349Build
2350-----
2351
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002352- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2353 build under OS X.
2354
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002355- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2356 --enable-profiling.
2357
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002358- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2359 is configured --with-tsc.
2360
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002361- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2362 on AMD64.
2363
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002364- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2365 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2366
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002367- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2368 removed.
2369
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002370- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2371 supported (see PEP 11).
2372
2373- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2374
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002375- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2376
2377- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2378 (see PEP 11).
2379
2380- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2381 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2382
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002383C API
2384-----
2385
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002386- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2387 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2388 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2389
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002390- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2391 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2392 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2393 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2394
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002395- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2396 generator objects.
2397
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002398- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2399 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002400 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2401 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002402
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002403- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2404 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2405
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002406- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2407 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2408 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2409 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2410 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2411
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002412- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2413 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2414 about 10% faster.
2415
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002416- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2417 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2418
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002419- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2420 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2421 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2422 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2423
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002424Windows
2425-------
2426
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002427- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2428 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2429 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2430 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2431
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002432- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2433 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2434 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2435
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002436
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002437What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2438===============================
2439
2440*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2441
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002442IDLE
2443----
2444
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002445- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2446 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2447 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2448 context-menu actions.
2449
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002450- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2451 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2452 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2453 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2454 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2455 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2456 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2457 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2458 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2459
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002460
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002461What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2462=============================================
2463
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002464*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002465
2466Core and builtins
2467-----------------
2468
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002469- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002470 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002471 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2472
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002473Extension modules
2474-----------------
2475
2476- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2477 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2478 than once. This has been fixed.
2479
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002480- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2481 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2482 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2483 call.
2484
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002485- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2486
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002487Library
2488-------
2489
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002490- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2491 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2492
2493- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2494 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2495 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2496 restored.
2497
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002498IDLE
2499----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002500
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002501- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002502
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002503Build
2504-----
2505
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002506- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2507 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2508
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002509C API
2510-----
2511
2512Windows
2513-------
2514
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002515- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2516 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2517
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002518- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2519
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002520Mac
2521---
2522
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002523- Various fixes to pimp.
2524
2525- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2526
2527- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2528 more problems than it solves.
2529
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002530
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002531What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2532=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002533
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002534*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2535
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002536Core and builtins
2537-----------------
2538
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002539- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2540 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2541
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002542- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2543 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002544 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002545
2546- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2547 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2548 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002549 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002550
2551- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2552 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002553
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002554- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2555 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2556 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2557
2558- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002559 770247.
2560
2561- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002562
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002563Extension modules
2564-----------------
2565
2566- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2567 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2568
2569- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2570
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002571- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2572
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002573- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2574 contained within the _strptime module.
2575
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002576- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2577 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2578
2579- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002580 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2581
2582- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2583 the find_class attribute, if present.
2584
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002585- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002586
2587 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2588 (SF bug 763298).
2589
2590 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002591 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2592 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2593 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002594
2595 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2596
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002597Library
2598-------
2599
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002600- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2601
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002602- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2603 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2604 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2605 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2606 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2607 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2608 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2609 or Tester().
2610
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002611- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2612 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2613 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2614 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2615 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2616 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2617 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2618 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2619 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002620
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002621 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002622
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002623- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2624 weren't before was an oversight.
2625
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002626- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2627 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2628
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002629- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2630 when there are no lines.
2631
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002632- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2633 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2634
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002635- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2636 to child processes.
2637
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002638- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2639
2640- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2641
2642- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2643 xmlrpclib.
2644
2645- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2646 responses.
2647
2648- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2649 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2650
2651- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2652 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2653 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2654
2655- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2656 used as patterns.
2657
2658- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2659 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2660 than Tk 8.3.
2661
2662- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2663
2664- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002665
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002666Tools/Demos
2667-----------
2668
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002669- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2670
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002671- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2672
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002673- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002674
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002675Build
2676-----
2677
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002678- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2679
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002680- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2681
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002682- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2683 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002684
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002685- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2686 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2687 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002688
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002689C API
2690-----
2691
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002692- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2693 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2694
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002695Windows
2696-------
2697
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002698- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2699 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2700 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2701 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2702 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2703 Python exception ::
2704
2705 thread.error: can't start new thread
2706
2707 is raised now.
2708
2709- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2710 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2711 instead of from DLL teardown.
2712
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002713Mac
2714---
2715
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002716- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002717 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002718 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2719 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2720 the executable in the bundle.
2721
2722- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002723
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002724- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2725
2726- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2727 on Panther.
2728
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002729What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2730================================
2731
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002732*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002733
2734Core and builtins
2735-----------------
2736
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002737- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2738 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2739 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2740 with the -i option.
2741
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002742- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2743 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2744
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002745- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2746 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2747
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002748- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2749 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2750 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2751 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2752 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2753 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2754 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2755 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2756 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2757 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2758 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2759 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2760 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002761
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002762- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2763 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2764 embedded in a lambda expression.
2765
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002766- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2767 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2768 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2769 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2770 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2771
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002772- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2773 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2774 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2775
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002776- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2777 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2778
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002779- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2780 It's writable again.
2781
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002782- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2783 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2784 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002785 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002786
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002787- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2788 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2789 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2790
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002791Extension modules
2792-----------------
2793
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002794- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2795 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2796
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002797- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2798 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2799 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2800 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2801
2802- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2803 collection.
2804
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002805- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2806 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2807 unique within a single program run.
2808
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002809- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2810 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2811
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002812- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2813 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2814
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002815- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2816 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002817
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002818- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2819
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002820- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2821 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2822
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002823- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2824 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2825 for many BSD-derived systems.
2826
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002827
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002828Library
2829-------
2830
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002831- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2832 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2833 primary ones:
2834
2835 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2836 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2837 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2838
2839 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2840 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2841 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2842 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2843 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2844 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2845
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002846- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2847 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2848 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2849 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2850 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2851 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2852 argument.
2853
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002854- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2855 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2856 in the archive.
2857
2858- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2859 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2860
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002861- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2862 569574).
2863
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002864- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2865 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2866 no more.
2867
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002868- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2869 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2870 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2871 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2872 code coverage.
2873
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002874- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2875 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2876 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002877 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2878 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002879
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002880- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2881 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2882 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002883 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002884
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002885- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2886
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002887- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2888 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2889 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2890 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2891
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002892- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2893 handling.
2894
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002895- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2896 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2897
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002898- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2899 in socket.py.
2900
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002901- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2902
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002903- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2904 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2905 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2906 opener with proxy support.
2907
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002908- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2909
2910- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2911
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002912Tools/Demos
2913-----------
2914
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002915- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2916
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002917- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2918
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002919- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2920 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002921
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002922- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2923 files.
2924
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002925Build
2926-----
2927
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002928- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002929 different root directory.
2930
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002931C API
2932-----
2933
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002934- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2935 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2936 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2937 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2938 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2939 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2940 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2941 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2942 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2943 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2944
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002945- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2946 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2947 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2948 from Python.
2949
2950
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002951New platforms
2952-------------
2953
2954None this time.
2955
2956Tests
2957-----
2958
2959- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2960 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2961
2962Windows
2963-------
2964
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002965- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2966
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002967- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2968 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2969 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2970 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2971 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2972 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2973 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2974 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2975 that's what it's for.
2976
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002977Mac
2978---
2979
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002980- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2981 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2982 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2983 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002984- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2985 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2986- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002987
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002988SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2989------------------------------------
2990
2991430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2992598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2993622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2994661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2995683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2996697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2997713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2998724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2999727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
3000729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
3001730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
3002731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
3003732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
3004733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
3005735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
3006740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
3007744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
3008745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
3009747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
3010749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
3011751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
3012753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
3013755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
3014757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
3015760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
3016
3017
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003018What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
3019================================
3020
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00003021*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003022
3023Core and builtins
3024-----------------
3025
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00003026- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
3027 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
3028
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00003029- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
3030 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
3031 and cannot be strings).
3032
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00003033- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
3034 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
3035 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
3036 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
3037
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00003038- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
3039 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
3040 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
3041 Python itself.
3042
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00003043- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
3044 the referenced object, if it has one.
3045
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00003046- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
3047 the thread started at
3048 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
3049
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00003050- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
3051 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
3052 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
3053 placed on a list index.
3054
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00003055- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
3056 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
3057 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
3058 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
3059
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003060- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
3061 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
3062 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
3063 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
3064 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
3065 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
3066 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
3067
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00003068- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
3069 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
3070 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
3071 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
3072 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
3073
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00003074- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
3075 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00003076
3077- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
3078 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
3079 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
3080 #693195.)
3081
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00003082- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
3083 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003084
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003085- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00003086 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003087 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
3088 interpreter executions, would fail.
3089
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003090- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00003091 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00003092 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003093
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003094Extension modules
3095-----------------
3096
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00003097- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
3098 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
3099 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
3100 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
3101
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00003102- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
3103 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
3104
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00003105- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
3106 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
3107 and Greg Chapman.)
3108
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003109- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
3110 recursively.
3111
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00003112- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00003113 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
3114 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
3115 leaks.
3116
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00003117- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
3118
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00003119- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
3120 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
3121 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
3122 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
3123 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
3124 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
3125 #705836.
3126
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00003127- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00003128 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
3129
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00003130- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
3131 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
3132 See SF bug #692416.
3133
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00003134- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
3135 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
3136
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00003137- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
3138 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
3139 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003140
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003141- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00003142 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
3143 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
3144
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00003145- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
3146 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
3147 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
3148 timeouts to work properly.
3149
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003150Library
3151-------
3152
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003153- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
3154 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
3155 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
3156 future release.
3157
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00003158- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
3159 for querying platform dependent features.
3160
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00003161- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00003162
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00003163- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
3164 pickle protocol versions.
3165
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00003166- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
3167 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
3168 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
3169
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00003170- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
3171
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00003172- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
3173 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
3174 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3175 modules.
3176
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003177- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3178 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3179 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3180
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003181- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3182 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3183
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003184- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3185 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3186 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3187
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003188- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003189 MS Office extensions.
3190
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003191- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3192 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3193
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003194- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3195 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3196
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003197- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3198 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3199 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3200 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3201 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3202 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3203
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003204- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3205 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3206 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003207
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003208- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3209 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3210 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3211
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003212- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3213
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003214- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3215 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3216 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3217
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003218Tools/Demos
3219-----------
3220
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003221- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3222 See the module docstring for details.
3223
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003224Build
3225-----
3226
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003227- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3228 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003229
3230C API
3231-----
3232
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003233- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3234
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003235- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3236 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3237 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3238
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003239- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3240 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003241
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003242 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3243 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3244 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003245
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003246- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003247 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3248
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003249- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3250 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3251 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003252
3253New platforms
3254-------------
3255
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003256None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003257
3258Tests
3259-----
3260
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003261- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3262 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003263
3264Windows
3265-------
3266
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003267- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3268 function.
3269
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003270- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3271 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003272
3273Mac
3274---
3275
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003276- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3277 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003278
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003279- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3280 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003281
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003282- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3283 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3284 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003285
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003286- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003287 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3288 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003289
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003290- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3291 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003292
3293
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003294What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3295=================================
3296
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003297*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003298
3299Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003300-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003301
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003302- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3303 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3304 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3305
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003306- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3307 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3308 (SF patch #664376.)
3309
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003310- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3311 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3312 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3313 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3314 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3315 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003316 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003317
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003318- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3319 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3320 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3321 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003322 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003323
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003324- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3325 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3326 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3327 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3328 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3329 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3330 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3331 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3332 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3333 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3334 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3335
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003336- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3337 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3338 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3339 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3340 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3341 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3342
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003343- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3344 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3345
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003346- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3347 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3348 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3349 case.)
3350
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003351- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3352 passed as unicode strings.
3353
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003354- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3355 See SF bug #683467.
3356
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003357- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3358 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3359
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003360- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3361
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003362- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3363
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003364- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3365 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3366 arguments.
3367
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003368- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3369 See SF bug #667147.
3370
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003371- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003372 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003373 See SF bug #676155.
3374
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003375- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003376 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003377 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3378 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3379 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3380 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3381 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3382 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003383
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003384Extension modules
3385-----------------
3386
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003387- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3388 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3389 tp_as_number pointer.
3390
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003391- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3392 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3393 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3394 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3395 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3396
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003397- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3398
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003399- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3400
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003401- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003402 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003403 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3404 patch #678531.)
3405
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003406- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3407 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3408
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003409- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3410 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3411
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003412- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3413
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003414- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3415 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3416 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3417
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003418- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3419
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003420- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3421 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3422
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003423- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003424
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003425- datetime changes:
3426
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003427 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3428
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003429 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3430 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3431 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3432 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3433 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3434 now.
3435
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003436 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003437 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3438 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003439
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003440 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003441 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003442 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3443 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3444 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3445 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003446
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003447 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3448 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3449 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003450 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3451
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003452 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3453 by a later example coded by Guido.
3454
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003455 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003456 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3457 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3458 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003459 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3460 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3461
3462 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3463 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3464 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3465 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3466 tzinfo subclass instance.
3467
3468 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3469 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3470 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3471 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3472 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3473 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3474 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3475 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003476
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003477 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3478 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3479 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3480 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3481 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003482 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3483
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003484 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003485
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003486 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3487 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3488 as a naive datetime object.
3489
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003490 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3491 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3492 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3493
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003494 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3495 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3496 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3497 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3498 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3499 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3500 comparison.
3501
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003502 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3503 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3504 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3505 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003506 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003507
3508 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003509
3510 and ::
3511
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003512 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3513
3514 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3515 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3516 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3517 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3518
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003519 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3520 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3521 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3522 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3523 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3524
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003525 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3526 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003527 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3528 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003529
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003530Library
3531-------
3532
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003533- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3534 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3535
3536- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3537 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3538 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3539 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3540 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3541 See PEP 307 for details.
3542
3543- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3544 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3545
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003546- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3547 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003548 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003549 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3550 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003551 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003552
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003553- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3554 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3555
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003556- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3557 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3558 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3559
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003560- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3561
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003562- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3563 exception.
3564
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003565- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3566 class.
3567
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003568- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3569 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3570 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3571
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003572- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3573 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3574
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003575- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003576 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3577 See SF bug #659228.
3578
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003579- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3580 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3581 See SF patch #651082.
3582
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003583- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003584
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003585- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3586 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3587
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003588- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003589 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003590
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003591- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3592 DOS paths from other platforms.
3593
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003594Tools/Demos
3595-----------
3596
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003597- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3598 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3599 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3600 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3601 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3602 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3603 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3604 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3605 example:
3606
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003607 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3608 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003609
3610 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3611
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003612
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003613Build
3614-----
3615
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003616- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3617 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3618 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003619 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3620
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003621 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3622
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003623- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3624 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3625 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3626 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3627 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3628 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3629 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3630 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3631 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3632
3633- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3634 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3635 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3636 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3637
3638- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3639 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3640
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003641C API
3642-----
3643
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003644- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3645 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003646
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003647- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3648 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3649 tp_as_number pointer.
3650
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003651- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3652 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3653 (SF #681367)
3654
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003655- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3656 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3657 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3658 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003659
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003660Tests
3661-----
3662
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003663- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003664 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3665 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3666 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3667 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3668 pydoc.)
3669
3670- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3671
3672- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003673
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003674Windows
3675-------
3676
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003677- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3678 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3679 time).
3680
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003681- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3682 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3683
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003684- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3685 release without strong cryptography.
3686
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003687- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003688 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003689
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003690- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3691 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3692
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003693Mac
3694---
3695
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003696- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3697 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003698
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003699- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3700 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3701 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003702
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003703- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3704 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003705
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003706- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3707 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3708 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3709 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003710
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003711- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003712 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3713 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3714 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003715
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003716
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003717What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003718=================================
3719
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003720*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003721
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003722Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003723--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003724
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003725- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3726
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003727- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3728 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003729 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003730 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003731 a different meaning than before.
3732
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003733- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003734 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003735 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003736
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003737- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003738 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003739 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003740
3741- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3742 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3743 and deallocation.
3744
3745- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3746 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3747
3748- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3749 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3750 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3751 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3752 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3753
3754- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3755 now detected by the garbage collector.
3756
3757- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3758 [SF bug 519621]
3759
3760- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3761 identifier.
3762
3763- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3764 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3765 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3766 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3767 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3768 [SF bug 563060]
3769
3770- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3771 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3772 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3773 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3774 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3775
3776- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3777 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3778 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3779
3780- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3781
3782- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3783 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3784 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3785 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3786 state of the slots would be lost.)
3787
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003788Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003789-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003790
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003791- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003792 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3793 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3794 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3795 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003796 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3797 Jython 2.1.
3798
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003799- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003800 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003801 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3802 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3803 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3804 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3805 these, see PEP 302.
3806
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003807- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3808 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3809 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3810
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003811- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3812 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3813 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3814
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003815- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3816 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3817 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3818
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003819- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3820 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3821 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3822 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3823 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3824 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3825 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3826 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3827 releases or implementations.
3828
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003829- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003830 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3831 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003832
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003833- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3834 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3835
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003836- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3837 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3838 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3839
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003840- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3841 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3842
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003843- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3844 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003845 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3846 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003847
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003848- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3849 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3850 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3851 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3852 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3853
3854 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3855 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3856 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3857 pattern.
3858
3859 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3860 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3861 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3862 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3863
3864 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3865 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3866 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3867 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3868 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3869 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3870
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003871- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3872 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3873 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3874 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3875 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3876 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3877 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3878 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003879
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003880- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3881 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3882 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3883 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3884 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003885 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3886 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3887 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3888 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3889 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3890 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3891 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003892
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003893- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3894 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3895
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003896- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3897 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3898 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3899 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3900 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3901 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3902 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3903 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3904 to Zack Weinberg!
3905
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003906- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3907 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3908 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3909 type. This has been fixed now.
3910
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003911- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3912 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3913 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3914
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003915- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3916 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3917 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3918 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3919 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3920 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3921 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3922 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003923 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003924
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003925- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3926 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3927 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003928
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003929- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3930 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3931 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3932 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3933 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3934 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3935 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3936 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003937 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003938 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3939 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3940
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003941- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3942 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3943 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3944 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3945 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3946 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3947 this.)
3948
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003949- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3950 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003951 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003952 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003953 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3954 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003955 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3956 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003957
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003958- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3959 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3960 currently running.
3961
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003962- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3963 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3964 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3965 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3966
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003967- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3968 as directory names.
3969
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003970- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3971 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3972
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003973- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3974 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3975
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003976- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003977 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3978 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003979
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003980- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3981 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3982 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3983 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3984 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3985
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003986- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3987 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3988 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3989 removed.
3990
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003991- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3992 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3993 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3994
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003995- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3996 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3997 to __debug__.
3998
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003999- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
4000 string to the left with zeros. For example,
4001 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
4002
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00004003- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
4004 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
4005 deprecated now.
4006
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00004007- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
4008 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
4009 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00004010
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00004011- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
4012 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
4013 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
4014 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
4015 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00004016
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00004017- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
4018 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
4019
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00004020- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
4021 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
4022 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004023 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00004024 is backward compatible.
4025
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00004026- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
4027 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
4028 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
4029 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
4030 could access a pointer to freed memory.
4031
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00004032- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
4033 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
4034 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
4035 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
4036 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
4037 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004038
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00004039- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
4040 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
4041
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004042- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
4043 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
4044
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004045- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
4046 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
4047 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
4048 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
4049 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
4050
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00004051- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
4052 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
4053 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
4054
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004055- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00004056 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
4057
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00004058- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
4059 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
4060 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00004061
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00004062- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
4063 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
4064
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00004065- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
4066 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
4067 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
4068
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00004069- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
4070
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004071Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004072-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004073
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00004074- Added three operators to the operator module:
4075 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
4076 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
4077 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
4078
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00004079- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
4080
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00004081- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
4082 archives.
4083
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004084- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
4085 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
4086 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
4087
4088 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
4089
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004090- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
4091 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
4092 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00004093 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004094
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00004095- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
4096 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
4097 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
4098 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00004099 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
4100 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
4101 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
4102 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00004103
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00004104- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
4105 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00004106
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00004107- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
4108
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00004109- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
4110 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
4111
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00004112- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
4113 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
4114 supported.
4115
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00004116- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
4117
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00004118- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
4119 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00004120
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00004121- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
4122 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
4123
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00004124- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
4125
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004126- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
4127 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
4128
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00004129- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
4130 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
4131 functions but callable type objects.
4132
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004133- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004134 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004135 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004136
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00004137- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
4138 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00004139
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00004140- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
4141 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00004142
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00004143- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
4144 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
4145 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
4146 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
4147
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00004148- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
4149 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00004150
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00004151- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
4152 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
4153 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
4154 and __imul__.
4155
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00004156- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00004157 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
4158 is called.
4159
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00004160- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
4161 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
4162 interpreter was compiled.
4163
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004164- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
4165 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
4166 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004167 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004168 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
4169 1, not 2.
4170
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00004171- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
4172 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
4173 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
4174 limit.
4175
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004176- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4177 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4178 bug #623464.
4179
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004180- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4181 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4182 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4183 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4184
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004185Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004186-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004187
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004188- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4189
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004190- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4191 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4192 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4193 with Python 2.3a2.
4194
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004195- os.path exposes getctime.
4196
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004197- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004198 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004199 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004200 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004201 unit tests of floating point results.
4202
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004203- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4204 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4205 has been increased.
4206
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004207- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4208 executed.
4209
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004210- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4211 postinstallation script.
4212
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004213- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4214 test the current module.
4215
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004216- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004217 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4218 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4219 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4220 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4221
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004222- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004223 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004224 Ward's Optik package.
4225
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004226- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4227 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4228 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4229 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4230
4231- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4232 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004233 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004234
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004235- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4236 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4237 shelf are binary pickles.
4238
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004239- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4240 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4241
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004242- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4243 modules are iterators now.
4244
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004245- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4246 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4247 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4248 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4249 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4250 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004251
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004252- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4253 with their entity value.
4254
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004255- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4256
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004257- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4258 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004259
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004260- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4261 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004262 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004263
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004264- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4265 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4266 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4267 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4268 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4269 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4270 main():
4271
4272 import locale
4273 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4274
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004275- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4276 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4277
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004278- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4279 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4280 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4281 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4282 to the new standard.
4283
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004284- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4285 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4286 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4287 an extension to the database.
4288
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004289- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4290 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4291 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4292 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004293 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004294
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004295- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004296 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004297
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004298- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4299 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4300 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4301 bounded integers.
4302
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004303- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4304 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4305 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4306 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4307 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4308 in existence.
4309
4310 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4311 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4312 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4313 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4314 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4315 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4316
4317 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4318 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4319 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4320 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4321
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004322- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4323 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4324 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4325
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004326- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4327
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004328- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4329 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4330 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4331 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4332
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004333- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4334 argument.
4335
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004336- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4337 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4338 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4339 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4340 [SF patch 560794].
4341
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004342- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4343 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4344 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004345 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4346 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4347 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004348
4349- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4350 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004351
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004352- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4353 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4354 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4355 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004356
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004357- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4358 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4359 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4360 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4361 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4362
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004363- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004364
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004365- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4366
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004367- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4368 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4369 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4370 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4371 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4372 identical to None.
4373
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004374- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4375 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4376 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4377 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4378 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4379 results now.
4380
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004381- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4382 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4383
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004384- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4385 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4386 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4387 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4388 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4389 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4390 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4391 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4392
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004393- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4394
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004395- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4396 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4397
4398- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4399 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4400 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4401 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4402 and other systems.
4403
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004404- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4405 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4406 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4407 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 +00004408 work well with these.
4409
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004410- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4411
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004412- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004413 connections.
4414
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004415- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4416 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4417 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4418
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004419- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4420 sets
4421
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004422- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4423 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4424 name.
4425
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004426- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4427 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4428 passed in.
4429
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004430- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004431 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004432 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4433 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004434
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004435- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4436
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004437- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4438
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004439- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4440 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4441 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4442
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004443- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4444 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4445 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4446 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004447 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004448
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004449- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004450 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004451 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004452
4453- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4454 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4455 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4456
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004457- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004458 the value of its expression argument.
4459
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004460- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4461 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4462 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4463
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004464- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4465 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4466 skipstone browser was included.
4467
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004468- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4469 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4470
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004471Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004472-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004473
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004474- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4475 names in addition to accepting file names.
4476
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004477- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4478 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4479 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4480 still used and useful.)
4481
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004482- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4483 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4484 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4485 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004486
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004487- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4488 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4489 the generated binary.
4490
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004491Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004492-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004493
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004494- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4495
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004496- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4497 except in the hands of experts.
4498
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004499- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004500 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4501 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4502 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004503
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004504- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4505 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4506 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4507 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4508 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4509 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4510 builds.
4511
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004512- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4513 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4514 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4515 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4516 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4517 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4518 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4519 new type.
4520
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004521- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004522
4523 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4524 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4525 positive infinities.
4526
4527 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4528 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4529 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4530 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4531 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4532 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4533 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4534
4535 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4536
4537 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4538
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004539- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4540 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4541 size of the executable.
4542
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004543- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4544 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4545 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4546 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004547
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004548- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4549
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004550- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4551 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4552 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004553
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004554- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4555 well as Unix.
4556
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004557- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4558 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4559 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4560 modules in the README file for details.
4561
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004562C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004563-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004564
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004565- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4566 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004567 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004568 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004569 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004570
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004571- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4572 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4573 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4574 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4575 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4576 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004577 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004578 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4579 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4580 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4581 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4582 aligned.)
4583
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004584- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4585 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4586 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4587
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004588- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4589 level.
4590
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004591- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4592 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4593 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4594 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4595 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4596
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004597- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4598 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4599 code.
4600
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004601- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4602 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4603 adjusting for negative indices.
4604
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004605- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4606 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4607 object.
4608
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004609- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4610 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4611 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4612
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004613- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4614 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004615
4616- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4617
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004618- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4619 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4620 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4621 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4622
4623- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4624
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004625- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004626
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004627- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004628 without going through the buffer API.
4629
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004630- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004631
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004632- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4633 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4634 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4635 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4636
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004637- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4638 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4639
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004640- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004641 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4642
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004643New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004644-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004645
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004646- OpenVMS is now supported.
4647
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004648- AtheOS is now supported.
4649
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004650- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4651
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004652- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4653
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004654Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004655-----
4656
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004657- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4658 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4659 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004660
4661Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004662-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004663
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004664- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4665 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4666 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4667 bugs.
4668 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004669 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004670 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4671 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004672 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004673
4674- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004675 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004676
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004677- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4678 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4679
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004680- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4681 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004682 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004683 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4684
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004685- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4686 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4687 use files" uninstall option).
4688
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004689- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4690
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004691- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4692 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4693
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004694- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4695 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4696 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4697
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004698- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4699 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4700 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4701 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4702 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004703 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4704 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4705 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004706
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004707- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004708 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004709 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4710 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4711 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4712 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4713 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4714 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4715 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4716 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4717 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4718 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4719 work around.
4720
4721- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4722 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4723 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4724 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4725 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4726 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4727 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4728 specified with O_CREAT too).
4729
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004730Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004731----
4732
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004733- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004734
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004735- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4736 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4737 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4738
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004739- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4740 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4741 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4742
4743- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4744 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4745 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4746 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4747 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4748 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4749 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4750 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004751
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004752- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4753 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4754 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004755
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004756- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4757 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4758 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4759 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4760 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004761
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004762- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4763 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4764 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004765
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004766- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4767 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004768
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004769- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4770 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4771 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4772 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4773 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004774
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004775- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4776 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4777 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4778
4779- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4780 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4781 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004782
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004783- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4784 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4785 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4786 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004787 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004788
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004789- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4790 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004791
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004792- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4793 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004794
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004795- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004796 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004797 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4798 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004799
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004800
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004801What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004802===============================
4803
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004804*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4805
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004806Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004807--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004808
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004809- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4810 with a custom metaclass.
4811
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004812Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004813-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004814
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004815- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4816 are proxies.
4817
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004818Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004819-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004820
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004821- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4822 very short strings.
4823
4824- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4825 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4826 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4827 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4828 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4829
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004830Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004831-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004832
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004833- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4834 close or delete time).
4835
4836- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4837 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4838
4839- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4840
4841- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004842 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004843
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004844Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004845-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004846
4847Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004848-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004849
4850C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004851-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004852
4853New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004854-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004855
4856Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004857-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004858
4859Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004860-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004861
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004862- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4863
4864- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4865 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4866
4867- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4868 deleted at process exit time.
4869
4870- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4871 in backslash.
4872
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004873Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004874----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004875
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004876- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4877 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4878 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4879
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004880
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004881What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004882===========================
4883
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004884*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4885
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004886Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004887--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004888
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004889- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4890 been extensively updated. See
4891
4892 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4893
4894 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4895
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004896- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4897 deleted!
4898
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004899- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4900 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4901 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4902 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4903 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4904
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004905- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4906
4907 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4908 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4909
4910 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4911 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4912 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4913 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4914 supported anyway.
4915
4916 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4917 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4918
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004919- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4920 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4921 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4922 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4923 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004924
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004925- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4926 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4927 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4928
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004929Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004930-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004931
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004932- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4933 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4934 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4935 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4936 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4937 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004938 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4939 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4940 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4941 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004942
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004943- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4944 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4945 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4946
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004947Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004948-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004949
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004950- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4951
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004952Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004953-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004954
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004955- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4956 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4957 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4958 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4959 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4960 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4961
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004962- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4963
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004964- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4965
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004966- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4967
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004968- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4969 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4970 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4971
4972- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4973
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004974Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004975-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004976
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004977- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4978 off a search on Google.
4979
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004980Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004981-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004982
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004983- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4984 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4985 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4986 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4987 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4988 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4989 other platforms should do likewise.
4990
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004991- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4992 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4993 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4994
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004995C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004996-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004997
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004998- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4999 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
5000 producing key-value pairs.
5001
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00005002- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00005003 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00005004 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
5005 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
5006 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
5007 previously went unchallenged.
5008
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005009New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005010-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005011
5012Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005013-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005014
5015Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005016-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005017
5018Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005019----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005020
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00005021- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
5022 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005023
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00005024- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
5025 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
5026 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
5027 home.
5028
5029
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005030What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005031===========================
5032
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005033*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
5034
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005035Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005036--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005037
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00005038- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
5039 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005040
5041 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00005042 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005043
5044 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
5045 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005046 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005047 This needs to be documented.
5048
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00005049- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
5050 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
5051
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00005052- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
5053 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
5054 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
5055
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00005056- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
5057 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
5058
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005059- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
5060 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
5061 class forbids it).
5062
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00005063- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
5064 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
5065 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
5066
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005067- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
5068
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005069Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005070-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005071
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00005072- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
5073 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005074 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00005075
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005076- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
5077 (like 1 + '').
5078
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005079Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005080-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005081
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005082- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
5083 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
5084 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
5085 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005086 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005087 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
5088
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00005089- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
5090 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
5091 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
5092 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
5093
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005094- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
5095 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005096 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
5097 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
5098 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005099
5100- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
5101 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005102
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00005103- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
5104 bytes on its input.
5105
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005106Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005107-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005108
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005109- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00005110 convenience function.
5111
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005112- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
5113 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
5114 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005115 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
5116 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
5117 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
5118 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
5119 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
5120 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005121
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00005122- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
5123 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
5124 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
5125 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
5126
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00005127- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
5128 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
5129 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
5130
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005131- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
5132 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
5133 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
5134 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
5135
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005136- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
5137 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005138 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005139 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
5140 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
5141 new -l and -e options.
5142
5143- statcache is now deprecated.
5144
5145- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
5146 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005147 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005148 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
5149 time properly taken into account.
5150
5151- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
5152 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
5153 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
5154 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
5155
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005156Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005157-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005158
5159Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005160-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005161
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005162- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
5163 is built with libdb3 if available.
5164
5165- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
5166
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005167C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005168-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005169
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00005170- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
5171 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
5172 PySequence_Size().
5173
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005174- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5175
5176- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5177 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5178 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5179
5180- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5181 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5182
5183- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5184 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5185
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005186New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005187-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005188
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005189- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5190 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5191
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005192- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5193 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5194
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005195- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5196
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005197Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005198-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005199
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005200- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5201 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5202
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005203Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005204-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005205
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005206Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005207----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005208
5209- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5210 removed completely in the next release.
5211
5212- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5213 OSX.
5214
5215- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5216 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5217
5218- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5219
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005220
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005221What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005222===========================
5223
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005224*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5225
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005226Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005227--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005228
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005229- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005230 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005231 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005232 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5233 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005234 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5235 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005236 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5237 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005238
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005239- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5240 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5241
5242- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5243 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5244
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005245Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005246-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005247
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005248- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5249 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5250 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5251 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5252 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5253 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5254 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5255 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5256
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005257- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5258 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5259 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5260 example).
5261
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005262- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005263 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005264 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005265 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005266
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005267- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5268 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5269 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005270 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005271
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005272- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5273 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5274 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5275 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5276 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5277 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5278
5279 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5280
5281 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5282
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005283Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005284-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005285
5286- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5287
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005288- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5289
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005290- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5291 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005292
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005293- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5294 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5295 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5296 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5297 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5298 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005299 attributes.
5300
5301- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5302 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5303 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005304
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005305- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5306 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5307 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005308
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005309- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5310 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5311 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005312 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5313 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5314
5315- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5316 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005317
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005318Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005319-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005320
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005321- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5322 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5323
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005324- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5325 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5326 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5327 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5328
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005329- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5330 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5331 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5332 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5333
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005334 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5335 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5336 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5337 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5338 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5339 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5340 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5341 without losing information).
5342
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005343- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005344 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5345 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5346 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5347 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5348 module).
5349
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005350 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005351 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5352 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5353 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5354 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005355
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005356- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005357 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5358 encoding.
5359
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005360- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5361 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5362
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005363- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005364 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5365
5366- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5367 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5368 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5369 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5370
5371- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5372
5373- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5374 ON, and OFF.
5375
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005376- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5377 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5378
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005379Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005380-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005381
5382- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5383 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5384 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005385
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005386- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5387 been added: -X and -E.
5388
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005389Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005390-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005391
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005392- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5393 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5394
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005395C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005396-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005397
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005398- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5399 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5400 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5401 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5402 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5403
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005404- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5405 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5406 as long) arguments.
5407
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005408- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5409 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5410 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5411 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5412 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5413 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5414
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005415- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5416 input.
5417
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005418New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005419-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005420
5421Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005422-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005423
5424Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005425-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005426
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005427- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5428 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5429 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5430
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005431- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5432 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5433 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005434 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005435
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005436 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5437 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5438 import signal
5439 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005440
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005441 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005442 while 1:
5443 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005444 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005445 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5446 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5447 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5448 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005449
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005450
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005451What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5452===========================
5453
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005454*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5455
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005456Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005457--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005458
5459- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5460 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5461 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5462
5463- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5464 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5465 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5466 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5467 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5468 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5469 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005470
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005471- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005472 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005473 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5474 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5475 associate a docstring with a property.
5476
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005477- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5478 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5479 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5480 other built-in object types.
5481
5482- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5483 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5484 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5485 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5486 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5487
5488- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5489 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5490
5491- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5492 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005493 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005494 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5495 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5496 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5497 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5498 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5499
5500- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5501 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5502 class.
5503
5504- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5505 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5506 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5507 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5508
5509- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5510 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5511 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5512 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5513
5514- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5515 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5516
5517- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5518 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5519 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5520 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5521 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005522 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005523 with the same value as s.
5524
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005525- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5526
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005527Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005528----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005529
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005530- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5531
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005532- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5533 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5534 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5535 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5536 objects.
5537
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005538- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5539 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005540 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5541 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5542
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005543- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5544 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5545 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5546
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005547Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005548-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005549
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005550- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5551 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5552 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5553 by the instances.
5554
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005555- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5556 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5557 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5558
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005559- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5560 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5561 before the entire comparison is complete.
5562
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005563- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5564 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5565 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5566
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005567- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5568 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5569 getwriter().
5570
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005571- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5572 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5573
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005574- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005575 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5576 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5577
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005578- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5579 iterable object.
5580
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005581- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5582 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005583
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005584- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5585 authentication.
5586
5587- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5588 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005589
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005590- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005591 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5592 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5593 a sample driver.)
5594
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005595Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005596-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005597
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005598- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5599 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5600 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5601 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5602 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5603 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5604 kernel has large file support.
5605
5606- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5607 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5608 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5609 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5610 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5611
5612- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5613 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5614 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5615
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005616C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005617-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005618
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005619- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5620 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5621
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005622New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005623-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005624
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005625- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5626 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5627
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005628Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005629-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005630
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005631- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5632 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5633 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5634 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5635 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5636
5637- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5638 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5639 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5640 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5641
5642- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5643 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5644
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005645Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005646-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005647
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005648- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005649 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5650 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005651
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005652
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005653What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5654===========================
5655
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005656*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5657
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005658Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005659----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005660
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005661- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5662 big to represent as a C double.
5663
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005664- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5665 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5666 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5667 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5668 restriction).
5669
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005670- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5671 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5672 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5673 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5674 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5675
5676 >>> dir([])
5677 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5678 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5679 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5680 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5681 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5682 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5683 'reverse', 'sort']
5684
5685 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5686
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005687- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005688 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5689 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5690 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5691 OverflowError exception.
5692
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005693- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005694 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005695 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5696 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5697 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5698 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5699 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005700 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005701 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5702 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5703
5704 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5705 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5706 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5707 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005708
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005709- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005710 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5711 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5712 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5713 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5714 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5715 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5716 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5717 once it is created.
5718
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005719- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5720 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5721 (key, value) pairs.
5722
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005723- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005724 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5725 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5726
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005727- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5728 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5729 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5730 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5731 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005732
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005733- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005734 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5735 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5736
5737 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5738
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005739- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005740 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5741
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005742Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005743-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005744
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005745- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005746 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5747 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005748
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005749- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5750 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5751 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5752 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5753 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5754 in this area anymore).
5755
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005756- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5757 threading.Timer.
5758
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005759- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5760 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5761
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005762- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005763 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5764
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005765- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005766 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5767 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5768 converted to Python longs.
5769
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005770- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005771 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5772
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005773- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5774 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5775 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5776
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005777Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005778-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005779
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005780- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5781 division operators as per PEP 238.
5782
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005783Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005784-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005785
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005786- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5787 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5788 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5789 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5790
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005791C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005792-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005793
5794- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005795
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005796- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5797 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005798 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005799
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005800 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5801 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005802 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005803 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005804
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005805- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005806 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5807 module:
5808
5809 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005810
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005811 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5812 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005813
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005814 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5815 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005816
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005817 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5818
5819 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5820
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005821- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005822 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5823 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5824 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005825
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005826New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005827-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005828
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005829- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5830 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5831 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5832 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5833 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005834
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005835Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005836-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005837
5838Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005839-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005840
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005841- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5842 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5843 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5844 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005845 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5846 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5847 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5848 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5849 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005850
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005851- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005852 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5853
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005854
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005855What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5856===========================
5857
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005858*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5859
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005860Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005861-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005862
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005863- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5864 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5865
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005866- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5867 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5868 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005869
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005870- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5871 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5872 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5873 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005874
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005875- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5876
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005877- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005878
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005879Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005880-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005881
5882- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005883 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005884 the module docstring for details.
5885
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005886Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005887-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005888
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005889- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005890 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5891 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5892 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005893
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005894- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5895 Nick Mathewson.
5896
5897Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005898----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005899
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005900- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5901 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5902 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5903 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5904 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5905 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5906 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5907 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5908
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005909- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5910 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5911 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5912 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5913
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005914- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5915 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5916 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5917 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5918 come a long way).
5919
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005920- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5921 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5922 write filters for these warnings).
5923
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005924- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5925 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5926 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5927 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5928 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5929
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005930- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5931 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5932 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5933 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5934 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5935 older distribution.
5936
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005937Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005938-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005939
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005940- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5941 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005942 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005943
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005944- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5945 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5946 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5947
5948- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5949
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005950- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5951
5952- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5953
5954- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5955
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005956- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005957
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005958- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5959
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005960New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005961-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005962
5963C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005964-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005965
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005966- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5967 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5968 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5969 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5970 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5971 against buffer overruns.
5972
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005973- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005974 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5975 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005976 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5977 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5978 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5979
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005980- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5981 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5982 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5983 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5984 deprecated.
5985
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005986Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005987-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005988
5989- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5990 relevant is found.
5991
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005992
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005993What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005994===========================
5995
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005996*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5997
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005998Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005999----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006000
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00006001- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
6002 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
6003 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
6004 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
6005 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
6006 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
6007 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
6008 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006009 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00006010 repaired.
6011
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00006012- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00006013 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00006014 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
6015 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
6016 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
6017 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
6018 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
6019 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
6020 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
6021 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
6022
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00006023- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
6024 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
6025 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
6026 leading BMO character).
6027
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006028- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
6029 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
6030 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
6031
6032 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
6033 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
6034 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006035
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006036 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
6037 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
6038 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
6039 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
6040 for various simple to use conversions.
6041
6042 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
6043 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
6044
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006045 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6046 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
6047 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
6048 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
6049 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6050 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
6051 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6052 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
6053 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6054 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
6055 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6056 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
6057 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6058 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
6059 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006060
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006061- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
6062 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
6063 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006064 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006065 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006066
6067 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006068 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
6069 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
6070 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
6071 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
6072 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006073 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
6074 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006075
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006076 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
6077 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
6078 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006079 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006080
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00006081- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
6082 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
6083 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
6084 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
6085 floating arithmetic,
6086
6087 x = 9007199254740992.0
6088 print long(x)
6089
6090 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
6091 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
6092 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
6093 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
6094 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
6095 functions are of good quality).
6096
6097 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
6098 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
6099 algorithms to break.
6100
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00006101- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
6102 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
6103 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
6104 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
6105 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
6106 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
6107 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
6108 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
6109 order.
6110
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006111- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
6112 operation along the most common code paths.
6113
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006114- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
6115 the same as dict.has_key(x).
6116
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00006117- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
6118 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
6119 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
6120 {}.update(UserDict())
6121
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006122- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
6123 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
6124 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
6125 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
6126 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
6127 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
6128 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
6129 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
6130
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006131- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00006132 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006133
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006134 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00006135 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
6136 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00006137 join() method of strings
6138 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006139 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
6140 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006141 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00006142 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006143
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00006144- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
6145 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
6146
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006147- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
6148 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
6149
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00006150- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
6151 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
6152 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
6153 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
6154
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006155- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
6156 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006157 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006158 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
6159 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00006160
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00006161- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
6162
6163
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006164Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006165-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006166
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006167- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006168 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006169 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
6170 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
6171
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00006172- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
6173 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
6174
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006175- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6176 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6177 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6178 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6179
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006180- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6181 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6182 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6183
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006184- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6185
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006186- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6187
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006188- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6189 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6190 that are still imported into string.py).
6191
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006192- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6193
6194- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6195 Now it does.
6196
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006197- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6198
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006199- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6200 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6201 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6202 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6203 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006204 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6205 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006206
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006207- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6208 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6209 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6210 'help(object)'.
6211
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006212Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006213-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006214
6215- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006216 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006217 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6218 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6219
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006220- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006221 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6222 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006223
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006224C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006225-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006226
6227- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6228 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006229
6230----
6231
6232**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**