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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +000015- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
16 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
17 be there.
18
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +000019- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
20 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
21 the LC_NUMERIC category.
22
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +000023- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
24 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
25 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
26
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +000027- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
28
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +000029- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
30 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
31 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +000032
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +000033- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
34 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
35
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +000036- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
37
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000038- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
39 new documentation and modified profiler and bdb modules for more details
40
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +000041- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
42
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +000043- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
44
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +000045- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
46 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
47
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +000048- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
49 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
50 Fixes bug #858016 .
51
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000052- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
53 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
54 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
55
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000056- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
57 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
58 improves their performance (about 35%).
59
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000060- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
61 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
62 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
63
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000064- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
65 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
66 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
67 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
68
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000069- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
70 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
71 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
72 length is not known).
73
74- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
75 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000076 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
77 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000078 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
79
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +000080- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
81 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
82
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000083- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
84 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
85 keyword arguments.
86
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000087- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
88 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
89 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
90
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000091- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
92 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
93 cases.
94
95- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
96 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
97 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
98 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
99 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
100 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
101 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
102 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
103 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
104 a release build.
105
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000106- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
107 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
108
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000109- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000110 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000111
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000112- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
113 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
114 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
115 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
116 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
117 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
118 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
119 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
120 destroyed.
121
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000122- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
123 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
124 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
125 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
126 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
127 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
128 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
129 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
130
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000131- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
132 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
133 character other than a space.
134
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000135- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
136 by the function object or by the method object, the function
137 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
138 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
139 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
140 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
141 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
142 attributes with the same name.
143
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000144- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
145 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
146 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
147 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
148 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
149 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
150 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
151 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
152 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
153 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
154 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
155 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
156 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
157 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000158
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000159- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
160 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
161 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
162 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
163 This has been repaired.
164
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000165- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
166
167- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
168
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000169- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
170 over a sequence.
171
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000172- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000173 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000174
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000175- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
176
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000177- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
178 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
179 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
180 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
181 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
182 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
183 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
184 records with equal keys is unchanged).
185
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000186- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
187 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
188 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
189
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000190- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
191 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
192 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
193 freelist.
194
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000195- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
196 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
197
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000198- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
199 number.
200
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000201- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
202 a TypeError exception.
203
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000204- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
205 820195.
206
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000207- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
208 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
209 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
210
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000211- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
212 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
213 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000214
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000215- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
216 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
217 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
218
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000219- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
220 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000221 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000222
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000223- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000224 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
225 the first call.
226
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000227
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000228Extension modules
229-----------------
230
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000231- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
232 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
233 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
234 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
235 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
236 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
237 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000238
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000239- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
240
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000241- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
242
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000243- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
244 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
245
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000246- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
247 fewer false positives.
248
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000249- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
250 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
251
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000252- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
253 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
254
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000255- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
256 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000257 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
258 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
259 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000260
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000261- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
262 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
263 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
264 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
265
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000266- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
267 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
268 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
269 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
270 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
271 #897625.
272
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000273- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
274 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
275
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000276- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
277 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
278 and pops on either side of the deque.
279
280- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
281 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
282
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000283- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
284 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
285 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
286 other functions that expect a function argument.
287
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000288- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
289
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000290- os.getsid was added.
291
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000292- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
293 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
294 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
295
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000296- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
297
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000298- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
299
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000300- readline.clear_history was added.
301
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000302- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
303
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000304- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
305
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000306- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
307
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000308- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
309
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000310- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
311
312- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
313
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000314- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
315
316- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
317
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000318- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
319 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
320 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
321
322- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
323 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
324 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
325 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
326 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
327 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
328 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
329
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000330- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
331 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
332 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
333 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000334
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000335- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
336 iterators from a single iterable.
337
338- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
339 of raising a TypeError exception.
340
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000341- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
342 as parameter.
343
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000344Library
345-------
346
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000347- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
348 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
349
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000350- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
351
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000352- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000353 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000354
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000355- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
356 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
357
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000358- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
359
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000360- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
361 on cygwin and mingw32.
362
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000363- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
364
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000365- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
366 module.
367
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000368- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
369 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
370 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
371
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000372- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
373 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
374 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
375
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000376- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
377
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000378- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
379
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000380- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
381 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
382
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000383- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
384 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
385 type pattern with the same value exists.
386
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000387- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
388 when run from the command prompt).
389
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000390- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
391 not taken into consideration when caching value.
392
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000393- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
394 default sort).
395
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000396- Added global runctx function to profile module
397
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000398- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
399
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000400- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
401
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000402- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
403
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000404- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
405 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
406 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
407 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
408 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
409 accordingly.
410
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000411- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
412 decoding standards.
413
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000414- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
415 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
416 called for all requests.
417
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000418- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
419 they are passed to the compiler.
420
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000421- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
422 indent, width and depth.
423
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000424- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
425 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
426
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000427- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
428 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
429
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000430- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
431
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000432- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
433
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000434- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
435
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000436- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
437 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
438
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000439- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000440 for better performance.
441
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000442- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000443
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000444- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
445 a string).
446
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000447- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
448
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000449- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
450
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000451- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
452
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000453- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
454
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000455- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
456 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
457 list of fieldnames.
458
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000459- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
460 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
461
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000462- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
463
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000464- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
465 empty lists.
466
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000467- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
468 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
469 and shelves.
470
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000471- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
472 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
473
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000474- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000475 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
476 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000477
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000478- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
479 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000480 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000481
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000482- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000483 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
484 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
485
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000486- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
487 and removed in Py2.4.
488
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000489- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
490
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000491- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
492
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000493Tools/Demos
494-----------
495
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000496- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
497 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
498
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000499- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
500
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000501- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
502 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
503 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
504 destination in situations where both files are given.
505
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000506- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
507 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
508 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
509 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
510
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000511- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
512
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000513- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
514 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
515 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
516 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
517 now.
518
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000519- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
520 in effect
521
522- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
523 C-c C-h
524
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000525- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
526 -d option was given.
527
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000528Build
529-----
530
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000531- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
532 --enable-profiling.
533
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000534- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
535 is configured --with-tsc.
536
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000537- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
538 on AMD64.
539
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000540- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
541 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
542
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000543- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
544 removed.
545
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000546- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
547 supported (see PEP 11).
548
549- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
550
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000551- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
552
553- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
554 (see PEP 11).
555
556- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
557 sizeof(char) must be 1.
558
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000559C API
560-----
561
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000562- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
563 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
564 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
565
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000566- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
567 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
568 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
569 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
570
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000571- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
572 generator objects.
573
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000574- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
575 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000576 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
577 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000578
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000579- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
580 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
581
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000582- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
583 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
584 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
585 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
586 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
587
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000588- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
589 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
590 about 10% faster.
591
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000592- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
593 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
594
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000595- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
596 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
597 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
598 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
599
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000600New platforms
601-------------
602
603Tests
604-----
605
606Windows
607-------
608
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000609- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
610 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
611 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
612 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
613
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000614- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
615 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
616 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
617
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000618Mac
619----
620
621
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000622What's New in Python 2.3 final?
623===============================
624
625*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
626
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000627IDLE
628----
629
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000630- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
631 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
632 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
633 context-menu actions.
634
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000635- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
636 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
637 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
638 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
639 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
640 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
641 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
642 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
643 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
644
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000645
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000646What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
647=============================================
648
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000649*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000650
651Core and builtins
652-----------------
653
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000654- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000655 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000656 comment at the end are still unsupported.
657
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000658Extension modules
659-----------------
660
661- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
662 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
663 than once. This has been fixed.
664
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000665- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
666 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
667 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
668 call.
669
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000670- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
671
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000672Library
673-------
674
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000675- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
676 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
677
678- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
679 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
680 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
681 restored.
682
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000683IDLE
684----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000685
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000686- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000687
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000688Build
689-----
690
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000691- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
692 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
693
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000694C API
695-----
696
697Windows
698-------
699
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000700- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
701 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
702
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000703- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
704
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000705Mac
706---
707
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000708- Various fixes to pimp.
709
710- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
711
712- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
713 more problems than it solves.
714
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000715
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000716What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
717=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000718
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000719*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
720
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000721Core and builtins
722-----------------
723
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000724- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
725 by sys.setcheckinterval().
726
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000727- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
728 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000729 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000730
731- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
732 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
733 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000734 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000735
736- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
737 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000738
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000739- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
740 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
741 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
742
743- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000744 770247.
745
746- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000747
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000748Extension modules
749-----------------
750
751- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
752 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
753
754- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
755
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000756- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
757
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000758- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
759 contained within the _strptime module.
760
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000761- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
762 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
763
764- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000765 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
766
767- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
768 the find_class attribute, if present.
769
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000770- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000771
772 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
773 (SF bug 763298).
774
775 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000776 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
777 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
778 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000779
780 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
781
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000782Library
783-------
784
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000785- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
786
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000787- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
788 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
789 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
790 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
791 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
792 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
793 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
794 or Tester().
795
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000796- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
797 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
798 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
799 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
800 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
801 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
802 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
803 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
804 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000805
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000806 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000807
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000808- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
809 weren't before was an oversight.
810
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000811- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
812 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
813
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000814- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
815 when there are no lines.
816
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000817- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
818 which could occur with Tk 8.4
819
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000820- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
821 to child processes.
822
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000823- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
824
825- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
826
827- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
828 xmlrpclib.
829
830- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
831 responses.
832
833- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
834 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
835
836- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
837 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
838 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
839
840- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
841 used as patterns.
842
843- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
844 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
845 than Tk 8.3.
846
847- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
848
849- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000850
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000851Tools/Demos
852-----------
853
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000854- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
855
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000856- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
857
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000858- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000859
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000860Build
861-----
862
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000863- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
864
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000865- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
866
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000867- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
868 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000869
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000870- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
871 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
872 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000873
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000874C API
875-----
876
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000877- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
878 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
879
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000880Windows
881-------
882
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000883- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
884 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
885 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
886 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
887 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
888 Python exception ::
889
890 thread.error: can't start new thread
891
892 is raised now.
893
894- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
895 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
896 instead of from DLL teardown.
897
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000898Mac
899---
900
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000901- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000902 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000903 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
904 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
905 the executable in the bundle.
906
907- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000908
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000909- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
910
911- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
912 on Panther.
913
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000914What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
915================================
916
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000917*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000918
919Core and builtins
920-----------------
921
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000922- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
923 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
924 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
925 with the -i option.
926
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000927- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
928 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
929
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000930- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
931 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
932
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000933- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
934 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
935 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
936 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
937 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
938 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
939 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
940 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
941 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
942 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
943 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
944 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
945 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000946
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000947- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
948 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
949 embedded in a lambda expression.
950
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000951- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
952 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
953 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
954 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
955 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
956
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000957- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
958 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
959 matches the restriction on classic classes.
960
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000961- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
962 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
963
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000964- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
965 It's writable again.
966
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000967- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
968 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
969 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000970 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000971
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000972- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
973 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
974 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
975
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000976Extension modules
977-----------------
978
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000979- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
980 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
981
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000982- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
983 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
984 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
985 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
986
987- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
988 collection.
989
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000990- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
991 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
992 unique within a single program run.
993
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000994- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
995 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
996
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000997- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
998 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
999
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001000- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1001 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001002
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001003- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1004
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001005- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1006 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1007
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001008- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1009 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1010 for many BSD-derived systems.
1011
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001012
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001013Library
1014-------
1015
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001016- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1017 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1018 primary ones:
1019
1020 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1021 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1022 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1023
1024 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1025 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1026 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1027 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1028 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1029 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1030
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001031- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1032 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1033 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1034 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1035 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1036 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1037 argument.
1038
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001039- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1040 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1041 in the archive.
1042
1043- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1044 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1045
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001046- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1047 569574).
1048
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001049- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1050 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1051 no more.
1052
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001053- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1054 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1055 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1056 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1057 code coverage.
1058
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001059- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1060 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1061 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001062 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1063 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001064
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001065- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1066 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1067 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001068 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001069
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001070- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1071
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001072- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1073 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1074 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1075 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1076
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001077- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1078 handling.
1079
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001080- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1081 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1082
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001083- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1084 in socket.py.
1085
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001086- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1087
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001088- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1089 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1090 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1091 opener with proxy support.
1092
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001093- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1094
1095- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1096
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001097Tools/Demos
1098-----------
1099
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001100- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1101
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001102- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1103
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001104- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1105 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001106
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001107- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1108 files.
1109
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001110Build
1111-----
1112
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001113- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001114 different root directory.
1115
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001116C API
1117-----
1118
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001119- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1120 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1121 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1122 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1123 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1124 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1125 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1126 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1127 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1128 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1129
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001130- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1131 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1132 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1133 from Python.
1134
1135
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001136New platforms
1137-------------
1138
1139None this time.
1140
1141Tests
1142-----
1143
1144- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1145 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1146
1147Windows
1148-------
1149
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001150- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1151
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001152- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1153 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1154 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1155 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1156 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1157 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1158 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1159 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1160 that's what it's for.
1161
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001162Mac
1163---
1164
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001165- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1166 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1167 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1168 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001169- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1170 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1171- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001172
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001173SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1174------------------------------------
1175
1176430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1177598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1178622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1179661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1180683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1181697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1182713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1183724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1184727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1185729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1186730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1187731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1188732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1189733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1190735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1191740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1192744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1193745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1194747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1195749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1196751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1197753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1198755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1199757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1200760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1201
1202
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001203What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1204================================
1205
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001206*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001207
1208Core and builtins
1209-----------------
1210
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001211- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1212 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1213
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001214- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1215 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1216 and cannot be strings).
1217
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001218- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1219 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1220 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1221 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1222
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001223- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1224 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1225 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1226 Python itself.
1227
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001228- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1229 the referenced object, if it has one.
1230
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001231- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1232 the thread started at
1233 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1234
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001235- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1236 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1237 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1238 placed on a list index.
1239
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001240- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1241 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1242 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1243 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1244
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001245- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1246 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1247 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1248 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1249 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1250 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1251 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1252
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001253- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1254 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1255 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1256 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1257 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1258
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001259- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1260 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001261
1262- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1263 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1264 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1265 #693195.)
1266
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001267- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1268 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001269
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001270- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001271 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001272 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1273 interpreter executions, would fail.
1274
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001275- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001276 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001277 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001278
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001279Extension modules
1280-----------------
1281
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001282- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1283 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1284 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1285 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1286
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001287- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1288 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1289
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001290- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1291 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1292 and Greg Chapman.)
1293
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001294- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1295 recursively.
1296
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001297- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001298 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1299 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1300 leaks.
1301
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001302- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1303
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001304- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1305 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1306 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1307 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1308 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1309 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1310 #705836.
1311
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001312- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001313 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1314
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001315- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1316 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1317 See SF bug #692416.
1318
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001319- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1320 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1321
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001322- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1323 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1324 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001325
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001326- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001327 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1328 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1329
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001330- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1331 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1332 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1333 timeouts to work properly.
1334
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001335Library
1336-------
1337
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001338- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1339 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1340 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1341 future release.
1342
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001343- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1344 for querying platform dependent features.
1345
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001346- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001347
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001348- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1349 pickle protocol versions.
1350
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001351- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1352 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1353 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1354
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001355- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1356
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001357- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1358 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1359 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1360 modules.
1361
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001362- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1363 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1364 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1365
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001366- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1367 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1368
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001369- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1370 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1371 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1372
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001373- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001374 MS Office extensions.
1375
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001376- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1377 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1378
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001379- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1380 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1381
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001382- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1383 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1384 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1385 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1386 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1387 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1388
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001389- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1390 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1391 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001392
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001393- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1394 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1395 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1396
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001397- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1398
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001399- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1400 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1401 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1402
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001403Tools/Demos
1404-----------
1405
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001406- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1407 See the module docstring for details.
1408
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001409Build
1410-----
1411
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001412- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1413 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001414
1415C API
1416-----
1417
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001418- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1419
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001420- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1421 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1422 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1423
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001424- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1425 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001426
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001427 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1428 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1429 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001430
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001431- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001432 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1433
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001434- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1435 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1436 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001437
1438New platforms
1439-------------
1440
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001441None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001442
1443Tests
1444-----
1445
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001446- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1447 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001448
1449Windows
1450-------
1451
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001452- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1453 function.
1454
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001455- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1456 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001457
1458Mac
1459---
1460
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001461- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1462 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001463
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001464- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1465 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001466
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001467- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1468 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1469 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001470
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001471- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001472 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1473 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001474
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001475- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1476 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001477
1478
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001479What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1480=================================
1481
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001482*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001483
1484Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001485-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001486
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001487- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1488 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1489 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1490
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001491- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1492 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1493 (SF patch #664376.)
1494
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001495- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1496 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1497 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1498 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1499 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1500 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001501 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001502
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001503- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1504 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1505 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1506 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001507 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001508
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001509- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1510 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1511 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1512 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1513 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1514 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1515 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1516 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1517 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1518 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1519 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1520
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001521- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1522 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1523 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1524 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1525 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1526 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1527
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001528- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1529 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1530
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001531- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1532 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1533 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1534 case.)
1535
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001536- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1537 passed as unicode strings.
1538
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001539- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1540 See SF bug #683467.
1541
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001542- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1543 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1544
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001545- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1546
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001547- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1548
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001549- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1550 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1551 arguments.
1552
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001553- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1554 See SF bug #667147.
1555
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001556- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001557 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001558 See SF bug #676155.
1559
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001560- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001561 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001562 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1563 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1564 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1565 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1566 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1567 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001568
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001569Extension modules
1570-----------------
1571
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001572- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1573 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1574 tp_as_number pointer.
1575
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001576- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1577 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1578 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1579 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1580 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1581
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001582- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1583
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001584- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1585
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001586- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001587 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001588 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1589 patch #678531.)
1590
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001591- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1592 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1593
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001594- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1595 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1596
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001597- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1598
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001599- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1600 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1601 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1602
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001603- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1604
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001605- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1606 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1607
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001608- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001609
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001610- datetime changes:
1611
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001612 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1613
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001614 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1615 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1616 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1617 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1618 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1619 now.
1620
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001621 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001622 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1623 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001624
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001625 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001626 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001627 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1628 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1629 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1630 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001631
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001632 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1633 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1634 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001635 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1636
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001637 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1638 by a later example coded by Guido.
1639
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001640 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001641 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1642 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1643 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001644 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1645 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1646
1647 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1648 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1649 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1650 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1651 tzinfo subclass instance.
1652
1653 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1654 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1655 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1656 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1657 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1658 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1659 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1660 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001661
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001662 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1663 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1664 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1665 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1666 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001667 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1668
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001669 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001670
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001671 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1672 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1673 as a naive datetime object.
1674
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001675 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1676 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1677 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1678
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001679 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1680 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1681 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1682 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1683 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1684 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1685 comparison.
1686
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001687 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1688 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1689 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1690 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001691 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001692
1693 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001694
1695 and ::
1696
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001697 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1698
1699 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1700 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1701 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1702 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1703
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001704 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1705 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1706 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1707 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1708 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1709
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001710 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1711 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001712 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1713 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001714
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001715Library
1716-------
1717
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001718- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1719 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1720
1721- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1722 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1723 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1724 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1725 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1726 See PEP 307 for details.
1727
1728- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1729 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1730
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001731- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1732 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001733 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001734 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1735 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001736 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001737
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001738- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1739 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1740
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001741- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1742 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1743 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1744
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001745- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1746
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001747- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1748 exception.
1749
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001750- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1751 class.
1752
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001753- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1754 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1755 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1756
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001757- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1758 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1759
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001760- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001761 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1762 See SF bug #659228.
1763
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001764- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1765 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1766 See SF patch #651082.
1767
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001768- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001769
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001770- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1771 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1772
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001773- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001774 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001775
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001776- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1777 DOS paths from other platforms.
1778
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001779Tools/Demos
1780-----------
1781
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001782- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1783 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1784 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1785 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1786 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1787 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1788 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1789 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1790 example:
1791
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001792 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1793 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001794
1795 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1796
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001797
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001798Build
1799-----
1800
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001801- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1802 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1803 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001804 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1805
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001806 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1807
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001808- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1809 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1810 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1811 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1812 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1813 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1814 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1815 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1816 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1817
1818- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1819 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1820 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1821 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1822
1823- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1824 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1825
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001826C API
1827-----
1828
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001829- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1830 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001831
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001832- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1833 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1834 tp_as_number pointer.
1835
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001836- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1837 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1838 (SF #681367)
1839
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001840- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1841 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1842 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1843 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001844
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001845Tests
1846-----
1847
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001848- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001849 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1850 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1851 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1852 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1853 pydoc.)
1854
1855- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1856
1857- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001858
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001859Windows
1860-------
1861
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001862- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1863 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1864 time).
1865
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001866- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1867 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1868
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001869- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1870 release without strong cryptography.
1871
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001872- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001873 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001874
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001875- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1876 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1877
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001878Mac
1879---
1880
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001881- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1882 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001883
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001884- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1885 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1886 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001887
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001888- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1889 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001890
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001891- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1892 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1893 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1894 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001895
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001896- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001897 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1898 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1899 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001900
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001901
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001902What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001903=================================
1904
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001905*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001906
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001907Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001908--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001909
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001910- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1911
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001912- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1913 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001914 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001915 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001916 a different meaning than before.
1917
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001918- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001919 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001920 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001921
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001922- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001923 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001924 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001925
1926- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1927 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1928 and deallocation.
1929
1930- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1931 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1932
1933- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1934 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1935 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1936 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1937 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1938
1939- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1940 now detected by the garbage collector.
1941
1942- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1943 [SF bug 519621]
1944
1945- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1946 identifier.
1947
1948- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1949 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1950 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1951 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1952 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1953 [SF bug 563060]
1954
1955- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1956 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1957 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1958 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1959 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1960
1961- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1962 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1963 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1964
1965- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1966
1967- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1968 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1969 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1970 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1971 state of the slots would be lost.)
1972
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001973Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001974-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001975
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001976- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001977 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1978 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1979 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1980 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001981 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1982 Jython 2.1.
1983
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001984- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001985 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001986 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1987 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1988 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1989 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1990 these, see PEP 302.
1991
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001992- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1993 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1994 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1995
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001996- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1997 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1998 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1999
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002000- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2001 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2002 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2003
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002004- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2005 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2006 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2007 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2008 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2009 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2010 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2011 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2012 releases or implementations.
2013
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002014- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002015 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2016 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002017
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002018- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2019 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2020
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002021- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2022 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2023 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2024
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002025- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2026 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2027
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002028- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2029 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002030 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2031 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002032
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002033- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2034 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2035 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2036 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2037 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2038
2039 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2040 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2041 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2042 pattern.
2043
2044 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2045 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2046 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2047 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2048
2049 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2050 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2051 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2052 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2053 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2054 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2055
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002056- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2057 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2058 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2059 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2060 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2061 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2062 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2063 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002064
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002065- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2066 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2067 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2068 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2069 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002070 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2071 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2072 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2073 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2074 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2075 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2076 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002077
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002078- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2079 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2080
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002081- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2082 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2083 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2084 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2085 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2086 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2087 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2088 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2089 to Zack Weinberg!
2090
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002091- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2092 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2093 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2094 type. This has been fixed now.
2095
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002096- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2097 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2098 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2099
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002100- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2101 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2102 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2103 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2104 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2105 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2106 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2107 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002108 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002109
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002110- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2111 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2112 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002113
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002114- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2115 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2116 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2117 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2118 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2119 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2120 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2121 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002122 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002123 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2124 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2125
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002126- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2127 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2128 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2129 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2130 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2131 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2132 this.)
2133
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002134- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2135 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002136 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002137 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002138 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2139 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002140 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2141 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002142
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002143- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2144 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2145 currently running.
2146
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002147- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2148 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2149 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2150 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2151
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002152- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2153 as directory names.
2154
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002155- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2156 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2157
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002158- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2159 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2160
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002161- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002162 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2163 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002164
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002165- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2166 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2167 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2168 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2169 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2170
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002171- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2172 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2173 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2174 removed.
2175
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002176- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2177 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2178 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2179
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002180- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2181 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2182 to __debug__.
2183
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002184- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2185 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2186 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2187
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002188- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2189 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2190 deprecated now.
2191
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002192- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2193 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2194 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002195
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002196- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2197 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2198 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2199 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2200 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002201
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002202- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2203 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2204
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002205- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2206 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2207 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002208 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002209 is backward compatible.
2210
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002211- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2212 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2213 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2214 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2215 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2216
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002217- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2218 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2219 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2220 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2221 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2222 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002223
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002224- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2225 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2226
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002227- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2228 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2229
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002230- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2231 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2232 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2233 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2234 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2235
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002236- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2237 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2238 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2239
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002240- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002241 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2242
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002243- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2244 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2245 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002246
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002247- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2248 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2249
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002250- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2251 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2252 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2253
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002254- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2255
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002256Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002257-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002258
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002259- Added three operators to the operator module:
2260 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2261 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2262 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2263
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002264- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2265
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002266- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2267 archives.
2268
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002269- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2270 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2271 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2272
2273 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2274
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002275- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2276 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2277 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002278 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002279
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002280- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2281 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2282 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2283 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002284 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2285 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2286 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2287 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002288
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002289- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2290 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002291
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002292- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2293
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002294- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2295 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2296
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002297- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2298 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2299 supported.
2300
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002301- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2302
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002303- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2304 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002305
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002306- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2307 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2308
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002309- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2310
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002311- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2312 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2313
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002314- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2315 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2316 functions but callable type objects.
2317
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002318- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002319 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002320 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002321
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002322- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2323 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002324
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002325- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2326 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002327
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002328- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2329 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2330 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2331 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2332
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002333- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2334 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002335
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002336- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2337 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2338 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2339 and __imul__.
2340
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002341- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002342 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2343 is called.
2344
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002345- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2346 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2347 interpreter was compiled.
2348
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002349- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2350 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2351 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002352 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002353 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2354 1, not 2.
2355
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002356- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2357 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2358 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2359 limit.
2360
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002361- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2362 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2363 bug #623464.
2364
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002365- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2366 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2367 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2368 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2369
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002370Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002371-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002372
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002373- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2374
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002375- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2376 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2377 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2378 with Python 2.3a2.
2379
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002380- os.path exposes getctime.
2381
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002382- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002383 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002384 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002385 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002386 unit tests of floating point results.
2387
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002388- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2389 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2390 has been increased.
2391
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002392- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2393 executed.
2394
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002395- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2396 postinstallation script.
2397
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002398- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2399 test the current module.
2400
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002401- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002402 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2403 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2404 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2405 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2406
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002407- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002408 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002409 Ward's Optik package.
2410
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002411- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2412 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2413 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2414 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2415
2416- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2417 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002418 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002419
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002420- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2421 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2422 shelf are binary pickles.
2423
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002424- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2425 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2426
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002427- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2428 modules are iterators now.
2429
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002430- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2431 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2432 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2433 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2434 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2435 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002436
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002437- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2438 with their entity value.
2439
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002440- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2441
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002442- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2443 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002444
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002445- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2446 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002447 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002448
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002449- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2450 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2451 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2452 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2453 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2454 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2455 main():
2456
2457 import locale
2458 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2459
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002460- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2461 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2462
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002463- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2464 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2465 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2466 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2467 to the new standard.
2468
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002469- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2470 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2471 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2472 an extension to the database.
2473
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002474- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2475 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2476 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2477 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002478 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002479
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002480- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002481 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002482
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002483- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2484 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2485 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2486 bounded integers.
2487
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002488- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2489 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2490 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2491 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2492 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2493 in existence.
2494
2495 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2496 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2497 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2498 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2499 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2500 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2501
2502 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2503 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2504 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2505 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2506
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002507- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2508 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2509 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2510
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002511- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2512
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002513- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2514 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2515 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2516 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2517
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002518- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2519 argument.
2520
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002521- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2522 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2523 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2524 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2525 [SF patch 560794].
2526
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002527- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2528 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2529 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002530 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2531 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2532 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002533
2534- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2535 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002536
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002537- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2538 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2539 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2540 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002541
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002542- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2543 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2544 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2545 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2546 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2547
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002548- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002549
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002550- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2551
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002552- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2553 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2554 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2555 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2556 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2557 identical to None.
2558
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002559- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2560 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2561 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2562 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2563 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2564 results now.
2565
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002566- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2567 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2568
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002569- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2570 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2571 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2572 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2573 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2574 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2575 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2576 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2577
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002578- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2579
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002580- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2581 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2582
2583- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2584 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2585 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2586 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2587 and other systems.
2588
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002589- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2590 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2591 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2592 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 +00002593 work well with these.
2594
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002595- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2596
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002597- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002598 connections.
2599
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002600- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2601 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2602 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2603
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002604- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2605 sets
2606
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002607- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2608 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2609 name.
2610
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002611- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2612 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2613 passed in.
2614
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002615- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002616 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002617 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2618 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002619
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002620- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2621
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002622- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2623
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002624- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2625 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2626 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2627
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002628- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2629 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2630 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2631 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002632 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002633
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002634- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002635 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002636 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002637
2638- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2639 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2640 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2641
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002642- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002643 the value of its expression argument.
2644
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002645- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2646 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2647 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2648
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002649- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2650 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2651 skipstone browser was included.
2652
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002653- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2654 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2655
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002656Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002657-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002658
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002659- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2660 names in addition to accepting file names.
2661
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002662- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2663 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2664 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2665 still used and useful.)
2666
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002667- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2668 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2669 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2670 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002671
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002672- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2673 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2674 the generated binary.
2675
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002676Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002677-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002678
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002679- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2680
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002681- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2682 except in the hands of experts.
2683
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002684- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002685 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2686 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2687 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002688
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002689- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2690 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2691 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2692 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2693 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2694 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2695 builds.
2696
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002697- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2698 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2699 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2700 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2701 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2702 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2703 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2704 new type.
2705
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002706- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002707
2708 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2709 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2710 positive infinities.
2711
2712 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2713 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2714 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2715 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2716 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2717 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2718 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2719
2720 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2721
2722 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2723
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002724- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2725 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2726 size of the executable.
2727
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002728- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2729 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2730 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2731 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002732
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002733- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2734
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002735- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2736 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2737 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002738
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002739- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2740 well as Unix.
2741
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002742- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2743 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2744 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2745 modules in the README file for details.
2746
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002747C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002748-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002749
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002750- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2751 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002752 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002753 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002754 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002755
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002756- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2757 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2758 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2759 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2760 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2761 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002762 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002763 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2764 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2765 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2766 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2767 aligned.)
2768
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002769- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2770 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2771 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2772
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002773- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2774 level.
2775
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002776- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2777 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2778 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2779 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2780 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2781
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002782- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2783 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2784 code.
2785
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002786- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2787 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2788 adjusting for negative indices.
2789
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002790- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2791 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2792 object.
2793
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002794- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2795 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2796 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2797
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002798- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2799 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002800
2801- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2802
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002803- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2804 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2805 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2806 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2807
2808- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2809
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002810- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002811
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002812- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002813 without going through the buffer API.
2814
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002815- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002816
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002817- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2818 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2819 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2820 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2821
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002822- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2823 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2824
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002825- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002826 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2827
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002828New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002829-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002830
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002831- OpenVMS is now supported.
2832
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002833- AtheOS is now supported.
2834
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002835- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2836
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002837- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2838
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002839Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002840-----
2841
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002842- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2843 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2844 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002845
2846Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002847-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002848
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002849- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2850 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2851 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2852 bugs.
2853 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002854 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002855 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2856 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002857 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002858
2859- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002860 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002861
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002862- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2863 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2864
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002865- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2866 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002867 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002868 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2869
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002870- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2871 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2872 use files" uninstall option).
2873
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002874- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2875
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002876- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2877 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2878
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002879- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2880 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2881 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2882
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002883- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2884 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2885 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2886 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2887 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002888 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2889 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2890 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002891
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002892- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002893 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002894 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2895 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2896 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2897 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2898 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2899 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2900 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2901 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2902 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2903 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2904 work around.
2905
2906- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2907 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2908 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2909 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2910 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2911 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2912 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2913 specified with O_CREAT too).
2914
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002915Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002916----
2917
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002918- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002919
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002920- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2921 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2922 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2923
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002924- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2925 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2926 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2927
2928- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2929 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2930 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2931 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2932 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2933 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2934 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2935 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002936
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002937- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2938 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2939 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002940
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002941- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2942 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2943 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2944 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2945 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002946
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002947- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2948 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2949 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002950
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002951- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2952 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002953
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002954- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2955 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2956 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2957 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2958 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002959
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002960- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2961 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2962 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2963
2964- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2965 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2966 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002967
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002968- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2969 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2970 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2971 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002972 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002973
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002974- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2975 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002976
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002977- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2978 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002979
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002980- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002981 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002982 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2983 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002984
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002985
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002986What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002987===============================
2988
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002989*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2990
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002991Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002992--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002993
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002994- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2995 with a custom metaclass.
2996
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002997Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002998-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002999
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003000- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3001 are proxies.
3002
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003003Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003004-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003005
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003006- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3007 very short strings.
3008
3009- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3010 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3011 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3012 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3013 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3014
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003015Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003016-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003017
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003018- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3019 close or delete time).
3020
3021- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3022 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3023
3024- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3025
3026- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003027 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003028
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003029Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003030-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003031
3032Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003033-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003034
3035C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003036-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003037
3038New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003039-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003040
3041Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003042-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003043
3044Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003045-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003046
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003047- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3048
3049- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3050 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3051
3052- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3053 deleted at process exit time.
3054
3055- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3056 in backslash.
3057
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003058Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003059----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003060
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003061- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3062 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3063 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3064
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003065
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003066What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003067===========================
3068
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003069*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3070
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003071Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003072--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003073
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003074- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3075 been extensively updated. See
3076
3077 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3078
3079 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3080
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003081- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3082 deleted!
3083
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003084- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3085 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3086 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3087 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3088 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3089
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003090- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3091
3092 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3093 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3094
3095 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3096 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3097 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3098 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3099 supported anyway.
3100
3101 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3102 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3103
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003104- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3105 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3106 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3107 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3108 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003109
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003110- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3111 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3112 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3113
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003114Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003115-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003116
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003117- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3118 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3119 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3120 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3121 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3122 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003123 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3124 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3125 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3126 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003127
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003128- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3129 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3130 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3131
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003132Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003133-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003134
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003135- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3136
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003137Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003138-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003139
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003140- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3141 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3142 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3143 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3144 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3145 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3146
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003147- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3148
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003149- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3150
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003151- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3152
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003153- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3154 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3155 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3156
3157- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3158
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003159Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003160-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003161
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003162- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3163 off a search on Google.
3164
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003165Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003166-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003167
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003168- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3169 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3170 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3171 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3172 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3173 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3174 other platforms should do likewise.
3175
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003176- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3177 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3178 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3179
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003180C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003181-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003182
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003183- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3184 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3185 producing key-value pairs.
3186
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003187- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003188 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003189 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3190 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3191 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3192 previously went unchallenged.
3193
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003194New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003195-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003196
3197Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003198-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003199
3200Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003201-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003202
3203Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003204----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003205
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003206- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3207 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003208
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003209- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3210 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3211 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3212 home.
3213
3214
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003215What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003216===========================
3217
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003218*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3219
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003220Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003221--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003222
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003223- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3224 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003225
3226 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003227 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003228
3229 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3230 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003231 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003232 This needs to be documented.
3233
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003234- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3235 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3236
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003237- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3238 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3239 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3240
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003241- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3242 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3243
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003244- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3245 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3246 class forbids it).
3247
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003248- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3249 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3250 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3251
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003252- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3253
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003254Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003255-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003256
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003257- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3258 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003259 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003260
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003261- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3262 (like 1 + '').
3263
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003264Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003265-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003266
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003267- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3268 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3269 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3270 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003271 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003272 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3273
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003274- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3275 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3276 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3277 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3278
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003279- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3280 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003281 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3282 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3283 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003284
3285- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3286 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003287
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003288- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3289 bytes on its input.
3290
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003291Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003292-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003293
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003294- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003295 convenience function.
3296
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003297- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3298 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3299 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003300 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3301 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3302 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3303 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3304 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3305 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003306
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003307- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3308 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3309 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3310 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3311
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003312- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3313 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3314 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3315
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003316- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3317 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3318 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3319 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3320
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003321- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3322 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003323 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003324 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3325 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3326 new -l and -e options.
3327
3328- statcache is now deprecated.
3329
3330- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3331 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003332 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003333 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3334 time properly taken into account.
3335
3336- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3337 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3338 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3339 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3340
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003341Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003342-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003343
3344Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003345-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003346
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003347- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3348 is built with libdb3 if available.
3349
3350- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3351
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003352C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003353-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003354
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003355- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3356 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3357 PySequence_Size().
3358
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003359- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3360
3361- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3362 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3363 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3364
3365- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3366 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3367
3368- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3369 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3370
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003371New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003372-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003373
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003374- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3375 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3376
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003377- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3378 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3379
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003380- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3381
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003382Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003383-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003384
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003385- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3386 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3387
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003388Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003389-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003390
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003391Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003392----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003393
3394- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3395 removed completely in the next release.
3396
3397- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3398 OSX.
3399
3400- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3401 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3402
3403- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3404
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003405
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003406What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003407===========================
3408
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003409*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3410
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003411Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003412--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003413
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003414- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003415 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003416 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003417 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3418 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003419 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3420 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003421 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3422 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003423
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003424- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3425 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3426
3427- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3428 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3429
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003430Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003431-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003432
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003433- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3434 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3435 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3436 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3437 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3438 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3439 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3440 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3441
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003442- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3443 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3444 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3445 example).
3446
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003447- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003448 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003449 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003450 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003451
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003452- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3453 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3454 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003455 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003456
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003457- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3458 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3459 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3460 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3461 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3462 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3463
3464 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3465
3466 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3467
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003468Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003469-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003470
3471- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3472
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003473- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3474
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003475- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3476 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003477
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003478- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3479 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3480 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3481 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3482 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3483 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003484 attributes.
3485
3486- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3487 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3488 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003489
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003490- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3491 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3492 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003493
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003494- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3495 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3496 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003497 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3498 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3499
3500- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3501 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003502
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003503Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003504-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003505
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003506- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3507 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3508
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003509- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3510 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3511 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3512 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3513
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003514- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3515 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3516 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3517 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3518
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003519 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3520 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3521 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3522 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3523 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3524 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3525 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3526 without losing information).
3527
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003528- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003529 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3530 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3531 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3532 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3533 module).
3534
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003535 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003536 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3537 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3538 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3539 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003540
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003541- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003542 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3543 encoding.
3544
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003545- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3546 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3547
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003548- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003549 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3550
3551- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3552 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3553 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3554 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3555
3556- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3557
3558- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3559 ON, and OFF.
3560
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003561- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3562 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3563
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003564Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003565-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003566
3567- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3568 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3569 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003570
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003571- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3572 been added: -X and -E.
3573
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003574Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003575-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003576
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003577- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3578 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3579
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003580C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003581-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003582
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003583- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3584 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3585 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3586 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3587 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3588
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003589- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3590 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3591 as long) arguments.
3592
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003593- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3594 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3595 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3596 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3597 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3598 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3599
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003600- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3601 input.
3602
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003603New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003604-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003605
3606Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003607-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003608
3609Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003610-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003611
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003612- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3613 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3614 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3615
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003616- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3617 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3618 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003619 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003620
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003621 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3622 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3623 import signal
3624 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003625
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003626 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003627 while 1:
3628 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003629 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003630 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3631 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3632 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3633 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003634
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003635
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003636What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3637===========================
3638
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003639*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3640
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003641Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003642--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003643
3644- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3645 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3646 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3647
3648- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3649 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3650 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3651 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3652 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3653 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3654 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003655
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003656- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003657 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003658 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3659 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3660 associate a docstring with a property.
3661
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003662- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3663 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3664 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3665 other built-in object types.
3666
3667- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3668 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3669 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3670 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3671 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3672
3673- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3674 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3675
3676- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3677 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003678 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003679 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3680 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3681 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3682 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3683 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3684
3685- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3686 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3687 class.
3688
3689- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3690 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3691 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3692 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3693
3694- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3695 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3696 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3697 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3698
3699- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3700 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3701
3702- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3703 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3704 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3705 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3706 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003707 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003708 with the same value as s.
3709
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003710- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3711
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003712Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003713----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003714
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003715- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3716
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003717- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3718 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3719 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3720 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3721 objects.
3722
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003723- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3724 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003725 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3726 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3727
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003728- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3729 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3730 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3731
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003732Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003733-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003734
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003735- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3736 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3737 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3738 by the instances.
3739
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003740- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3741 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3742 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3743
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003744- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3745 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3746 before the entire comparison is complete.
3747
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003748- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3749 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3750 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3751
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003752- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3753 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3754 getwriter().
3755
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003756- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3757 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3758
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003759- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003760 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3761 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3762
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003763- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3764 iterable object.
3765
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003766- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3767 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003768
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003769- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3770 authentication.
3771
3772- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3773 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003774
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003775- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003776 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3777 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3778 a sample driver.)
3779
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003780Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003781-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003782
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003783- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3784 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3785 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3786 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3787 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3788 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3789 kernel has large file support.
3790
3791- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3792 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3793 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3794 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3795 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3796
3797- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3798 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3799 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3800
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003801C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003802-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003803
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003804- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3805 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3806
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003807New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003808-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003809
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003810- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3811 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3812
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003813Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003814-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003815
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003816- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3817 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3818 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3819 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3820 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3821
3822- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3823 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3824 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3825 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3826
3827- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3828 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3829
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003830Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003831-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003832
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003833- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003834 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3835 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003836
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003837
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003838What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3839===========================
3840
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003841*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3842
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003843Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003844----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003845
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003846- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3847 big to represent as a C double.
3848
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003849- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3850 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3851 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3852 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3853 restriction).
3854
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003855- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3856 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3857 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3858 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3859 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3860
3861 >>> dir([])
3862 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3863 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3864 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3865 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3866 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3867 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3868 'reverse', 'sort']
3869
3870 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3871
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003872- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003873 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3874 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3875 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3876 OverflowError exception.
3877
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003878- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003879 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003880 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3881 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3882 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3883 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3884 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003885 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003886 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3887 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3888
3889 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3890 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3891 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3892 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003893
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003894- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003895 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3896 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3897 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3898 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3899 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3900 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3901 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3902 once it is created.
3903
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003904- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3905 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3906 (key, value) pairs.
3907
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003908- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003909 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3910 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3911
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003912- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3913 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3914 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3915 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3916 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003917
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003918- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003919 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3920 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3921
3922 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3923
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003924- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003925 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3926
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003927Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003928-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003929
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003930- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003931 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3932 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003933
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003934- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3935 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3936 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3937 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3938 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3939 in this area anymore).
3940
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003941- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3942 threading.Timer.
3943
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003944- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3945 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3946
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003947- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003948 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3949
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003950- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003951 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3952 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3953 converted to Python longs.
3954
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003955- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003956 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3957
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003958- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3959 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3960 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3961
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003962Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003963-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003964
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003965- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3966 division operators as per PEP 238.
3967
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003968Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003969-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003970
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003971- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3972 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3973 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3974 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3975
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003976C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003977-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003978
3979- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003980
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003981- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3982 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003983 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003984
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003985 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3986 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003987 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003988 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003989
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003990- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003991 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3992 module:
3993
3994 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003995
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003996 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3997 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003998
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003999 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4000 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004001
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004002 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4003
4004 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4005
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004006- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004007 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4008 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4009 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004010
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004011New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004012-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004013
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004014- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4015 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4016 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4017 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4018 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004019
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004020Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004021-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004022
4023Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004024-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004025
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004026- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4027 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4028 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4029 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004030 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4031 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4032 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4033 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4034 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004035
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004036- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004037 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4038
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004039
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004040What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4041===========================
4042
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004043*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4044
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004045Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004046-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004047
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004048- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4049 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4050
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004051- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4052 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4053 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004054
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004055- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4056 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4057 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4058 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004059
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004060- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4061
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004062- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004063
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004064Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004065-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004066
4067- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004068 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004069 the module docstring for details.
4070
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004071Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004072-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004073
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004074- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004075 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4076 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4077 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004078
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004079- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4080 Nick Mathewson.
4081
4082Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004083----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004084
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004085- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4086 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4087 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4088 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4089 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4090 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4091 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4092 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4093
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004094- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4095 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4096 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4097 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4098
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004099- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4100 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4101 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4102 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4103 come a long way).
4104
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004105- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4106 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4107 write filters for these warnings).
4108
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004109- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4110 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4111 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4112 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4113 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4114
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004115- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4116 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4117 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4118 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4119 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4120 older distribution.
4121
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004122Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004123-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004124
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004125- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4126 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004127 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004128
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004129- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4130 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4131 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4132
4133- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4134
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004135- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4136
4137- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4138
4139- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4140
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004141- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004142
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004143- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4144
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004145New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004146-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004147
4148C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004149-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004150
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004151- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4152 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4153 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4154 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4155 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4156 against buffer overruns.
4157
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004158- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004159 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4160 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004161 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4162 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4163 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4164
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004165- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4166 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4167 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4168 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4169 deprecated.
4170
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004171Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004172-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004173
4174- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4175 relevant is found.
4176
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004177
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004178What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004179===========================
4180
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004181*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4182
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004183Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004184----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004185
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004186- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4187 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4188 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4189 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4190 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4191 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4192 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4193 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004194 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004195 repaired.
4196
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004197- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004198 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004199 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4200 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4201 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4202 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4203 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4204 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4205 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4206 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4207
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004208- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4209 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4210 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4211 leading BMO character).
4212
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004213- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4214 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4215 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4216
4217 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4218 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4219 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004220
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004221 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4222 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4223 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4224 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4225 for various simple to use conversions.
4226
4227 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4228 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4229
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004230 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4231 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4232 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4233 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4234 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4235 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4236 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4237 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4238 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4239 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4240 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4241 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4242 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4243 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4244 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004245
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004246- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4247 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4248 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004249 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004250 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004251
4252 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004253 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4254 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4255 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4256 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4257 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004258 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4259 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004260
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004261 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4262 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4263 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004264 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004265
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004266- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4267 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4268 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4269 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4270 floating arithmetic,
4271
4272 x = 9007199254740992.0
4273 print long(x)
4274
4275 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4276 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4277 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4278 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4279 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4280 functions are of good quality).
4281
4282 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4283 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4284 algorithms to break.
4285
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004286- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4287 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4288 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4289 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4290 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4291 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4292 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4293 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4294 order.
4295
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004296- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4297 operation along the most common code paths.
4298
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004299- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4300 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4301
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004302- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4303 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4304 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4305 {}.update(UserDict())
4306
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004307- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4308 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4309 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4310 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4311 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4312 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4313 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4314 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4315
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004316- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004317 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004318
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004319 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004320 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4321 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004322 join() method of strings
4323 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004324 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4325 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004326 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004327 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004328
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004329- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4330 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4331
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004332- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4333 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4334
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004335- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4336 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4337 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4338 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4339
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004340- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4341 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004342 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004343 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4344 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004345
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004346- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4347
4348
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004349Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004350-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004351
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004352- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004353 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004354 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4355 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4356
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004357- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4358 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4359
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004360- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4361 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4362 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4363 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4364
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004365- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4366 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4367 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4368
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004369- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4370
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004371- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4372
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004373- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4374 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4375 that are still imported into string.py).
4376
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004377- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4378
4379- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4380 Now it does.
4381
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004382- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4383
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004384- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4385 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4386 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4387 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4388 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004389 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4390 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004391
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004392- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4393 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4394 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4395 'help(object)'.
4396
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004397Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004398-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004399
4400- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004401 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004402 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4403 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4404
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004405- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004406 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4407 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004408
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004409C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004410-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004411
4412- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4413 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004414
4415----
4416
4417**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**