blob: 3a819b881f182fcedd884cf3160f064496222486 [file] [log] [blame]
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
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +000015- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
16 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
17
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +000018- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
19 It's writable again.
20
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +000021- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
22 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
23 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
24 preferred, then __iter__ can be overriden.
25
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000026Extension modules
27-----------------
28
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +000029- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
30 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
31
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +000032- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
33 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +000034
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +000035- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
36
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +000037- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
38 Fixes SF bug #730685.
39
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +000040- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
41 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
42 for many BSD-derived systems.
43
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000044Library
45-------
46
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +000047- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
48 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
49 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
50 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
51
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +000052- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
53 handling.
54
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +000055- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
56 __doc__ of data descriptors.
57
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +000058- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
59 in socket.py.
60
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000061Tools/Demos
62-----------
63
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +000064- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
65 files.
66
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000067Build
68-----
69
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +000070- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows to specify a
71 different root directory.
72
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000073C API
74-----
75
76New platforms
77-------------
78
79None this time.
80
81Tests
82-----
83
84- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
85 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
86
87Windows
88-------
89
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +000090- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
91 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
92 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
93 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
94 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
95 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
96 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
97 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
98 that's what it's for.
99
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000100Mac
101---
102
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000103- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
104 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
105 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
106 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000107
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000108What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
109================================
110
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000111*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000112
113Core and builtins
114-----------------
115
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000116- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
117 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
118
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000119- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
120 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
121 and cannot be strings).
122
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000123- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
124 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
125 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
126 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
127
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000128- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
129 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
130 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
131 Python itself.
132
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000133- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
134 the referenced object, if it has one.
135
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000136- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
137 the thread started at
138 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
139
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000140- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
141 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
142 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
143 placed on a list index.
144
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000145- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
146 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
147 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
148 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
149
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000150- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
151 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
152 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
153 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
154 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
155 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
156 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
157
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000158- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
159 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
160 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
161 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
162 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
163
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000164- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
165 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000166
167- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
168 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
169 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
170 #693195.)
171
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000172- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
173 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000174
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000175- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000176 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000177 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
178 interpreter executions, would fail.
179
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000180- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000181 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000182 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000183
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000184Extension modules
185-----------------
186
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000187- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
188 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
189 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
190 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
191
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000192- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
193 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
194
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000195- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
196 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
197 and Greg Chapman.)
198
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000199- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
200 recursively.
201
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000202- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000203 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
204 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
205 leaks.
206
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000207- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
208
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000209- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
210 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
211 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
212 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
213 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
214 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
215 #705836.
216
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000217- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzet()
218 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
219
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000220- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
221 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
222 See SF bug #692416.
223
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000224- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
225 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
226
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000227- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
228 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
229 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000230
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000231- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000232 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
233 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
234
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000235- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
236 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
237 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
238 timeouts to work properly.
239
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000240Library
241-------
242
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000243- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
244 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
245 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
246 future release.
247
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000248- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
249 for querying platform dependent features.
250
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000251- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000252
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000253- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
254 pickle protocol versions.
255
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000256- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
257 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
258 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
259
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000260- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
261
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000262- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
263 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
264 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
265 modules.
266
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000267- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
268 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
269 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
270
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000271- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
272 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
273
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000274- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
275 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
276 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
277
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000278- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000279 MS Office extensions.
280
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000281- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
282 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
283
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000284- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
285 execution speed of expressions and statements.
286
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000287- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
288 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
289 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
290 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
291 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
292 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
293
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000294- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
295 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
296 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000297
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000298- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
299 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
300 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
301
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000302- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
303
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000304- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
305 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
306 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
307
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000308Tools/Demos
309-----------
310
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +0000311- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
312 See the module docstring for details.
313
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000314Build
315-----
316
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000317- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
318 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000319
320C API
321-----
322
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000323- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
324
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000325- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
326 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
327 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
328
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000329- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
330 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000331
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000332 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
333 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
334 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000335
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000336- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000337 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
338
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000339- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
340 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
341 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000342
343New platforms
344-------------
345
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000346None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000347
348Tests
349-----
350
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000351- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
352 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000353
354Windows
355-------
356
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +0000357- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
358 function.
359
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000360- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
361 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000362
363Mac
364---
365
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000366- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
367 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000368
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000369- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
370 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000371
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000372- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
373 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
374 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000375
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000376- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +0000377 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
378 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000379
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000380- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
381 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000382
383
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000384What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
385=================================
386
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000387*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000388
389Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000390-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000391
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000392- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
393 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
394 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
395
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000396- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
397 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
398 (SF patch #664376.)
399
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000400- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
401 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
402 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
403 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
404 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
405 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000406 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000407
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000408- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
409 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
410 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
411 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000412 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000413
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000414- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
415 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
416 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
417 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
418 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
419 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
420 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
421 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
422 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
423 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
424 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
425
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000426- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
427 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
428 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
429 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
430 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
431 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
432
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000433- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
434 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
435
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000436- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
437 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
438 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
439 case.)
440
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000441- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
442 passed as unicode strings.
443
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000444- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
445 See SF bug #683467.
446
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000447- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
448 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
449
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000450- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
451
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000452- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
453
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000454- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
455 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
456 arguments.
457
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000458- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
459 See SF bug #667147.
460
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000461- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000462 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000463 See SF bug #676155.
464
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000465- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000466 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000467 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
468 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
469 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
470 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
471 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
472 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000473
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000474Extension modules
475-----------------
476
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000477- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
478 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
479 tp_as_number pointer.
480
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000481- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
482 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
483 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
484 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
485 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
486
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000487- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
488
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000489- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
490
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000491- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000492 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000493 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
494 patch #678531.)
495
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000496- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
497 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
498
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000499- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
500 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
501
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000502- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
503
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000504- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
505 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
506 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
507
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000508- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
509
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000510- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
511 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
512
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000513- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000514
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000515- datetime changes:
516
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +0000517 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
518
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000519 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
520 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
521 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
522 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
523 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
524 now.
525
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000526 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000527 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
528 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000529
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000530 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000531 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000532 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
533 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
534 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
535 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000536
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000537 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
538 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
539 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000540 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
541
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000542 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
543 by a later example coded by Guido.
544
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000545 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000546 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
547 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
548 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000549 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
550 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
551
552 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
553 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
554 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
555 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
556 tzinfo subclass instance.
557
558 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
559 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
560 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
561 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
562 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
563 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
564 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
565 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000566
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000567 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
568 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
569 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
570 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
571 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000572 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
573
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000574 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000575
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000576 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
577 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
578 as a naive datetime object.
579
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000580 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
581 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
582 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
583
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000584 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
585 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
586 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
587 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
588 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
589 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
590 comparison.
591
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000592 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
593 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
594 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
595 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000596 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000597
598 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000599
600 and ::
601
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000602 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
603
604 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
605 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
606 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
607 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
608
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000609 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
610 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
611 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
612 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
613 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
614
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000615 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
616 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000617 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
618 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000619
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000620Library
621-------
622
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000623- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
624 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
625
626- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
627 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
628 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
629 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
630 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
631 See PEP 307 for details.
632
633- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
634 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
635
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000636- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
637 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000638 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000639 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
640 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000641 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000642
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000643- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
644 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
645
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000646- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
647 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
648 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
649
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000650- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
651
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000652- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
653 exception.
654
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000655- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
656 class.
657
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000658- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
659 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
660 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
661
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000662- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
663 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
664
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000665- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000666 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
667 See SF bug #659228.
668
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000669- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
670 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
671 See SF patch #651082.
672
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000673- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000674
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000675- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
676 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
677
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000678- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000679 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000680
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000681- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
682 DOS paths from other platforms.
683
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000684Tools/Demos
685-----------
686
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000687- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
688 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
689 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
690 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
691 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
692 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
693 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
694 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
695 example:
696
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000697 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
698 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000699
700 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
701
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000702
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000703Build
704-----
705
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000706- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
707 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
708 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000709 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
710
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000711 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
712
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000713- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
714 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
715 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
716 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
717 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
718 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
719 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
720 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
721 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
722
723- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
724 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
725 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
726 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
727
728- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
729 from the Tools/scripts directory.
730
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000731C API
732-----
733
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000734- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
735 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000736
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000737- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
738 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
739 tp_as_number pointer.
740
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000741- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
742 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
743 (SF #681367)
744
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000745- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
746 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
747 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
748 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000749
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000750Tests
751-----
752
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +0000753- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000754 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
755 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
756 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
757 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
758 pydoc.)
759
760- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
761
762- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000763
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000764Windows
765-------
766
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000767- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
768 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
769 time).
770
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000771- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
772 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
773
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000774- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
775 release without strong cryptography.
776
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000777- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000778 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000779
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000780- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
781 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
782
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000783Mac
784---
785
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000786- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
787 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000788
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000789- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
790 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
791 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000792
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000793- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
794 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000795
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000796- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
797 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
798 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
799 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000800
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000801- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000802 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
803 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
804 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000805
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000806
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000807What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000808=================================
809
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000810*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000811
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000812Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000813--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000814
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000815- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
816
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000817- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
818 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000819 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000820 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000821 a different meaning than before.
822
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000823- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000824 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000825 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000826
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000827- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000828 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000829 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000830
831- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
832 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
833 and deallocation.
834
835- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
836 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
837
838- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
839 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
840 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
841 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
842 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
843
844- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
845 now detected by the garbage collector.
846
847- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
848 [SF bug 519621]
849
850- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
851 identifier.
852
853- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
854 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
855 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
856 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
857 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
858 [SF bug 563060]
859
860- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
861 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
862 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
863 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
864 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
865
866- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
867 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
868 not called. [SF bug #537450]
869
870- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
871
872- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
873 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
874 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
875 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
876 state of the slots would be lost.)
877
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000878Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000879-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000880
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000881- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000882 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
883 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
884 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
885 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000886 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
887 Jython 2.1.
888
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000889- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000890 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000891 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
892 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
893 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
894 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
895 these, see PEP 302.
896
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000897- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
898 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
899 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
900
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000901- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
902 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
903 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
904
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000905- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
906 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
907 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
908
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000909- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
910 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
911 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
912 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
913 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
914 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
915 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
916 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
917 releases or implementations.
918
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000919- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000920 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
921 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000922
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000923- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
924 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
925
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000926- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
927 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
928 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
929
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000930- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
931 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
932
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000933- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
934 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000935 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
936 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000937
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000938- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
939 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
940 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
941 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
942 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
943
944 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
945 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
946 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
947 pattern.
948
949 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
950 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
951 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
952 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
953
954 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
955 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
956 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
957 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
958 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
959 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
960
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000961- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
962 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
963 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
964 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
965 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
966 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
967 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
968 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000969
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000970- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
971 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
972 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
973 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
974 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000975 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
976 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
977 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
978 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
979 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
980 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
981 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000982
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000983- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
984 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
985
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000986- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
987 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
988 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
989 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
990 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
991 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
992 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
993 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
994 to Zack Weinberg!
995
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000996- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
997 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
998 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
999 type. This has been fixed now.
1000
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001001- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1002 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1003 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1004
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001005- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1006 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1007 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1008 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1009 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1010 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1011 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1012 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001013 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001014
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001015- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1016 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1017 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001018
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001019- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1020 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1021 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1022 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1023 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1024 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1025 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1026 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001027 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001028 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1029 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1030
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001031- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1032 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1033 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1034 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1035 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1036 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1037 this.)
1038
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001039- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1040 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001041 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001042 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001043 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1044 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001045 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1046 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001047
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001048- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1049 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1050 currently running.
1051
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001052- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1053 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1054 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1055 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1056
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001057- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1058 as directory names.
1059
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001060- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1061 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1062
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001063- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1064 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1065
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001066- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001067 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1068 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001069
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001070- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1071 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1072 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1073 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1074 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1075
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001076- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1077 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1078 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1079 removed.
1080
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001081- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1082 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1083 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1084
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001085- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1086 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1087 to __debug__.
1088
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001089- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1090 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1091 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1092
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001093- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1094 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1095 deprecated now.
1096
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001097- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1098 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1099 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001100
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001101- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1102 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1103 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1104 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1105 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001106
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001107- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1108 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1109
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001110- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1111 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1112 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001113 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001114 is backward compatible.
1115
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001116- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1117 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1118 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1119 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1120 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1121
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001122- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1123 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1124 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1125 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1126 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1127 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001128
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001129- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1130 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1131
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001132- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1133 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1134
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001135- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1136 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1137 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1138 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1139 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1140
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001141- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1142 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1143 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1144
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001145- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001146 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1147
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001148- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1149 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1150 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001151
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001152- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1153 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1154
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001155- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1156 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1157 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1158
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001159- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1160
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001161Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001162-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001163
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001164- Added three operators to the operator module:
1165 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1166 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1167 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1168
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001169- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1170
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001171- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1172 archives.
1173
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001174- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1175 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1176 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1177
1178 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1179
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001180- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1181 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1182 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001183 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001184
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001185- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1186 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1187 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1188 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001189 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1190 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1191 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1192 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001193
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001194- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1195 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001196
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001197- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1198
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001199- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1200 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1201
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001202- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1203 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1204 supported.
1205
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001206- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1207
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001208- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1209 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001210
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001211- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1212 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1213
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001214- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1215
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001216- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1217 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1218
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001219- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1220 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1221 functions but callable type objects.
1222
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001223- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001224 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001225 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001226
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001227- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1228 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001229
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001230- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1231 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001232
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001233- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1234 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1235 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1236 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1237
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001238- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1239 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001240
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001241- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1242 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1243 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1244 and __imul__.
1245
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001246- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001247 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1248 is called.
1249
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001250- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1251 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1252 interpreter was compiled.
1253
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001254- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1255 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1256 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001257 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001258 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1259 1, not 2.
1260
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001261- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1262 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1263 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1264 limit.
1265
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001266- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1267 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1268 bug #623464.
1269
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001270- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1271 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1272 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1273 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1274
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001275Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001276-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001277
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001278- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1279
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001280- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1281 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1282 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1283 with Python 2.3a2.
1284
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001285- os.path exposes getctime.
1286
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001287- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001288 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001289 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001290 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001291 unit tests of floating point results.
1292
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001293- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1294 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1295 has been increased.
1296
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001297- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1298 executed.
1299
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001300- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1301 postinstallation script.
1302
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001303- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1304 test the current module.
1305
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001306- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001307 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1308 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1309 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1310 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1311
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001312- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001313 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001314 Ward's Optik package.
1315
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001316- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1317 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1318 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1319 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1320
1321- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1322 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001323 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001324
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001325- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1326 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1327 shelf are binary pickles.
1328
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001329- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1330 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1331
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001332- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1333 modules are iterators now.
1334
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001335- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1336 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1337 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1338 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1339 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1340 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001341
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001342- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1343 with their entity value.
1344
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001345- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1346
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001347- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1348 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001349
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001350- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1351 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001352 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001353
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001354- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1355 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1356 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1357 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1358 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1359 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1360 main():
1361
1362 import locale
1363 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1364
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001365- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1366 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1367
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001368- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1369 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1370 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1371 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1372 to the new standard.
1373
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001374- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1375 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1376 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1377 an extension to the database.
1378
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001379- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1380 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1381 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1382 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001383 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001384
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001385- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001386 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001387
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001388- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1389 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1390 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1391 bounded integers.
1392
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001393- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1394 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1395 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1396 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1397 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1398 in existence.
1399
1400 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1401 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1402 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1403 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1404 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1405 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1406
1407 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1408 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1409 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1410 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1411
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001412- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1413 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1414 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1415
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001416- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1417
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001418- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1419 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1420 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1421 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1422
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001423- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1424 argument.
1425
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001426- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1427 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1428 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1429 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1430 [SF patch 560794].
1431
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001432- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1433 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1434 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001435 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1436 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1437 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001438
1439- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1440 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001441
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001442- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1443 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1444 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1445 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001446
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001447- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1448 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1449 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1450 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1451 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1452
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001453- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001454
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001455- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1456
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001457- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1458 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1459 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1460 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1461 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1462 identical to None.
1463
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001464- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1465 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1466 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1467 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1468 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1469 results now.
1470
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001471- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1472 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1473
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001474- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1475 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1476 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1477 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1478 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1479 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1480 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1481 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1482
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001483- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1484
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001485- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1486 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1487
1488- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1489 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1490 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1491 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1492 and other systems.
1493
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001494- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1495 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1496 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1497 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 +00001498 work well with these.
1499
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001500- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1501
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001502- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001503 connections.
1504
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001505- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1506 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1507 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1508
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001509- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1510 sets
1511
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001512- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1513 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1514 name.
1515
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001516- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1517 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1518 passed in.
1519
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001520- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001521 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001522 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1523 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001524
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001525- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1526
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001527- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1528
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001529- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1530 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1531 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1532
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001533- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1534 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1535 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1536 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001537 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001538
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001539- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001540 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001541 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001542
1543- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1544 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1545 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1546
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001547- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001548 the value of its expression argument.
1549
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001550- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1551 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1552 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1553
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001554- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1555 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1556 skipstone browser was included.
1557
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001558- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1559 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1560
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001561Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001562-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001563
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001564- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1565 names in addition to accepting file names.
1566
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001567- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1568 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1569 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1570 still used and useful.)
1571
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001572- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1573 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1574 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1575 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001576
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001577- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1578 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1579 the generated binary.
1580
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001581Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001582-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001583
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001584- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1585
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001586- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1587 except in the hands of experts.
1588
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001589- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001590 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1591 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1592 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001593
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001594- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1595 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1596 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1597 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1598 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1599 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1600 builds.
1601
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001602- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1603 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1604 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1605 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1606 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1607 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1608 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1609 new type.
1610
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001611- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001612
1613 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1614 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1615 positive infinities.
1616
1617 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1618 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1619 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1620 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1621 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1622 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1623 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1624
1625 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1626
1627 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1628
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001629- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1630 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1631 size of the executable.
1632
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001633- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1634 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1635 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1636 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001637
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001638- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1639
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001640- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1641 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1642 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001643
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001644- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1645 well as Unix.
1646
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001647- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1648 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1649 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1650 modules in the README file for details.
1651
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001652C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001653-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001654
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001655- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1656 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001657 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001658 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001659 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001660
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001661- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1662 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1663 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1664 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1665 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1666 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001667 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001668 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1669 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1670 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1671 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1672 aligned.)
1673
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001674- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1675 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1676 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1677
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001678- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1679 level.
1680
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001681- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1682 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1683 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1684 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1685 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1686
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001687- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1688 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1689 code.
1690
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001691- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1692 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1693 adjusting for negative indices.
1694
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001695- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1696 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1697 object.
1698
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001699- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1700 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1701 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1702
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001703- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1704 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001705
1706- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1707
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001708- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1709 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1710 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1711 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1712
1713- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1714
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001715- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001716
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001717- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001718 without going through the buffer API.
1719
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001720- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001721
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001722- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1723 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1724 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1725 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1726
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001727- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1728 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1729
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001730- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001731 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1732
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001733New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001734-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001735
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001736- OpenVMS is now supported.
1737
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001738- AtheOS is now supported.
1739
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001740- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1741
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001742- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1743
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001744Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001745-----
1746
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001747- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1748 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1749 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001750
1751Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001752-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001753
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001754- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1755 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1756 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1757 bugs.
1758 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001759 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001760 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1761 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001762 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001763
1764- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001765 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001766
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001767- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1768 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1769
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001770- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1771 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001772 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001773 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1774
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001775- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1776 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1777 use files" uninstall option).
1778
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001779- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1780
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001781- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1782 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1783
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001784- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1785 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1786 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1787
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001788- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1789 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1790 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1791 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1792 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001793 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1794 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1795 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001796
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001797- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001798 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001799 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1800 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1801 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1802 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1803 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1804 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1805 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1806 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1807 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1808 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1809 work around.
1810
1811- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1812 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1813 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1814 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1815 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1816 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1817 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1818 specified with O_CREAT too).
1819
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001820Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001821----
1822
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001823- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001824
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001825- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1826 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1827 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1828
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001829- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1830 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1831 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1832
1833- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1834 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1835 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1836 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1837 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1838 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1839 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1840 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001841
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001842- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1843 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1844 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001845
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001846- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1847 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1848 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1849 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1850 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001851
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001852- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1853 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1854 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001855
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001856- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1857 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001858
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001859- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1860 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1861 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1862 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1863 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001864
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001865- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1866 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1867 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1868
1869- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1870 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1871 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001872
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001873- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1874 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1875 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1876 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001877 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001878
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001879- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1880 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001881
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001882- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1883 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001884
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001885- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001886 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001887 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1888 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001889
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001890
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001891What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001892===============================
1893
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001894*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1895
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001896Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001897--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001898
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001899- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1900 with a custom metaclass.
1901
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001902Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001903-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001904
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001905- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1906 are proxies.
1907
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001908Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001909-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001910
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001911- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1912 very short strings.
1913
1914- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1915 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1916 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1917 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1918 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1919
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001920Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001921-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001922
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001923- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1924 close or delete time).
1925
1926- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1927 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1928
1929- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1930
1931- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001932 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001933
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001934Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001935-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001936
1937Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001938-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001939
1940C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001941-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001942
1943New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001944-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001945
1946Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001947-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001948
1949Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001950-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001951
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001952- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1953
1954- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1955 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1956
1957- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1958 deleted at process exit time.
1959
1960- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1961 in backslash.
1962
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001963Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001964----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001965
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001966- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1967 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1968 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1969
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001970
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001971What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001972===========================
1973
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001974*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1975
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001976Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001977--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001978
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001979- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1980 been extensively updated. See
1981
1982 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1983
1984 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1985
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001986- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1987 deleted!
1988
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001989- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1990 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1991 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1992 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1993 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1994
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001995- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1996
1997 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1998 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1999
2000 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2001 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2002 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2003 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2004 supported anyway.
2005
2006 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2007 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2008
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002009- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2010 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2011 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2012 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2013 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002014
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002015- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2016 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2017 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2018
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002019Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002020-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002021
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002022- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2023 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2024 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2025 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2026 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2027 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002028 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2029 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2030 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2031 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002032
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002033- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2034 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2035 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2036
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002037Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002038-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002039
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002040- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2041
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002042Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002043-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002044
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002045- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2046 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2047 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2048 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2049 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2050 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2051
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002052- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2053
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002054- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2055
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002056- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2057
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002058- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2059 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2060 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2061
2062- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2063
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002064Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002065-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002066
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002067- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2068 off a search on Google.
2069
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002070Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002071-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002072
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002073- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2074 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2075 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2076 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2077 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2078 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2079 other platforms should do likewise.
2080
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002081- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2082 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2083 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2084
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002085C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002086-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002087
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002088- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2089 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2090 producing key-value pairs.
2091
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002092- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002093 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002094 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2095 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2096 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2097 previously went unchallenged.
2098
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002099New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002100-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002101
2102Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002103-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002104
2105Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002106-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002107
2108Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002109----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002110
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002111- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2112 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002113
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002114- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2115 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2116 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2117 home.
2118
2119
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002120What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002121===========================
2122
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002123*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2124
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002125Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002126--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002127
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002128- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2129 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002130
2131 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002132 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002133
2134 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2135 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002136 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002137 This needs to be documented.
2138
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002139- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2140 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2141
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002142- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2143 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2144 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2145
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002146- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2147 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2148
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002149- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2150 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2151 class forbids it).
2152
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002153- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2154 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2155 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2156
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002157- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2158
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002159Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002160-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002161
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002162- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2163 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002164 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002165
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002166- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2167 (like 1 + '').
2168
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002169Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002170-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002171
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002172- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2173 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2174 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2175 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002176 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002177 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2178
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002179- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2180 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2181 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2182 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2183
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002184- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2185 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002186 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2187 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2188 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002189
2190- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2191 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002192
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002193- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2194 bytes on its input.
2195
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002196Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002197-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002198
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002199- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002200 convenience function.
2201
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002202- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2203 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2204 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002205 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2206 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2207 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2208 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2209 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2210 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002211
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002212- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2213 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2214 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2215 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2216
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002217- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2218 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2219 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2220
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002221- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2222 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2223 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2224 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2225
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002226- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2227 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002228 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002229 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2230 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2231 new -l and -e options.
2232
2233- statcache is now deprecated.
2234
2235- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2236 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002237 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002238 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2239 time properly taken into account.
2240
2241- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2242 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2243 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2244 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2245
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002246Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002247-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002248
2249Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002250-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002251
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002252- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2253 is built with libdb3 if available.
2254
2255- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2256
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002257C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002258-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002259
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002260- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2261 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2262 PySequence_Size().
2263
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002264- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2265
2266- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2267 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2268 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2269
2270- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2271 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2272
2273- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2274 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2275
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002276New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002277-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002278
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002279- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2280 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2281
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002282- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2283 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2284
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002285- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2286
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002287Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002288-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002289
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002290- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2291 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2292
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002293Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002294-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002295
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002296Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002297----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002298
2299- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2300 removed completely in the next release.
2301
2302- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2303 OSX.
2304
2305- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2306 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2307
2308- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2309
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002310
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002311What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002312===========================
2313
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002314*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2315
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002316Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002317--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002318
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002319- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002320 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002321 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002322 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2323 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002324 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2325 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002326 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2327 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002328
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002329- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2330 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2331
2332- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2333 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2334
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002335Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002336-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002337
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002338- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2339 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2340 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2341 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2342 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2343 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2344 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2345 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2346
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002347- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2348 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2349 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2350 example).
2351
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002352- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002353 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002354 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002355 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002356
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002357- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2358 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2359 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002360 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002361
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002362- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2363 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2364 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2365 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2366 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2367 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2368
2369 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2370
2371 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2372
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002373Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002374-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002375
2376- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2377
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002378- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2379
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002380- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2381 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002382
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002383- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2384 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2385 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2386 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2387 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2388 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002389 attributes.
2390
2391- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2392 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2393 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002394
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002395- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2396 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2397 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002398
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002399- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2400 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2401 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002402 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2403 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2404
2405- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2406 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002407
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002408Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002409-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002410
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002411- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2412 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2413
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002414- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2415 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2416 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2417 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2418
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002419- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2420 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2421 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2422 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2423
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002424 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2425 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2426 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2427 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2428 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2429 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2430 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2431 without losing information).
2432
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002433- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002434 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2435 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2436 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2437 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2438 module).
2439
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002440 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002441 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2442 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2443 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2444 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002445
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002446- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002447 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2448 encoding.
2449
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002450- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2451 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2452
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002453- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002454 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2455
2456- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2457 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2458 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2459 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2460
2461- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2462
2463- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2464 ON, and OFF.
2465
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002466- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2467 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2468
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002469Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002470-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002471
2472- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2473 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2474 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002475
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002476- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2477 been added: -X and -E.
2478
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002479Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002480-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002481
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002482- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2483 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2484
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002485C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002486-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002487
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002488- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2489 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2490 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2491 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2492 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2493
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002494- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2495 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2496 as long) arguments.
2497
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002498- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2499 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2500 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2501 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2502 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2503 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2504
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002505- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2506 input.
2507
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002508New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002509-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002510
2511Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002512-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002513
2514Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002515-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002516
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002517- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2518 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2519 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2520
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002521- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2522 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2523 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002524 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002525
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002526 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2527 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2528 import signal
2529 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002530
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002531 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002532 while 1:
2533 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002534 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002535 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2536 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2537 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2538 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002539
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002540
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002541What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2542===========================
2543
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002544*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2545
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002546Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002547--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002548
2549- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2550 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2551 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2552
2553- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2554 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2555 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2556 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2557 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2558 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2559 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002560
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002561- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002562 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002563 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2564 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2565 associate a docstring with a property.
2566
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002567- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2568 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2569 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2570 other built-in object types.
2571
2572- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2573 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2574 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2575 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2576 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2577
2578- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2579 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2580
2581- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2582 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002583 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002584 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2585 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2586 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2587 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2588 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2589
2590- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2591 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2592 class.
2593
2594- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2595 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2596 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2597 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2598
2599- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2600 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2601 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2602 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2603
2604- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2605 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2606
2607- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2608 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2609 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2610 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2611 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002612 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002613 with the same value as s.
2614
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002615- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2616
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002617Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002618----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002619
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002620- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2621
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002622- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2623 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2624 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2625 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2626 objects.
2627
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002628- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2629 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002630 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2631 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2632
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002633- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2634 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2635 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2636
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002637Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002638-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002639
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002640- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2641 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2642 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2643 by the instances.
2644
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002645- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2646 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2647 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2648
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002649- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2650 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2651 before the entire comparison is complete.
2652
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002653- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2654 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2655 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2656
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002657- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2658 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2659 getwriter().
2660
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002661- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2662 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2663
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002664- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002665 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2666 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2667
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002668- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2669 iterable object.
2670
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002671- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2672 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002673
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002674- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2675 authentication.
2676
2677- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2678 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002679
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002680- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002681 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2682 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2683 a sample driver.)
2684
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002685Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002686-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002687
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002688- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2689 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2690 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2691 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2692 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2693 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2694 kernel has large file support.
2695
2696- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2697 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2698 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2699 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2700 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2701
2702- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2703 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2704 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2705
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002706C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002707-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002708
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002709- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2710 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2711
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002712New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002713-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002714
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002715- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2716 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2717
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002718Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002719-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002720
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002721- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2722 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2723 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2724 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2725 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2726
2727- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2728 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2729 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2730 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2731
2732- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2733 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2734
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002735Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002736-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002737
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002738- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002739 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2740 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002741
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002742
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002743What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2744===========================
2745
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002746*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2747
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002748Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002749----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002750
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002751- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2752 big to represent as a C double.
2753
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002754- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2755 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2756 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2757 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2758 restriction).
2759
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002760- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2761 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2762 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2763 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2764 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2765
2766 >>> dir([])
2767 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2768 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2769 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2770 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2771 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2772 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2773 'reverse', 'sort']
2774
2775 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2776
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002777- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002778 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2779 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2780 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2781 OverflowError exception.
2782
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002783- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002784 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002785 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2786 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2787 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2788 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2789 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002790 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002791 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2792 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2793
2794 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2795 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2796 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2797 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002798
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002799- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002800 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2801 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2802 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2803 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2804 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2805 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2806 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2807 once it is created.
2808
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002809- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2810 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2811 (key, value) pairs.
2812
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002813- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002814 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2815 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2816
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002817- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2818 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2819 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2820 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2821 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002822
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002823- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002824 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2825 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2826
2827 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2828
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002829- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002830 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2831
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002832Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002833-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002834
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002835- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002836 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2837 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002838
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002839- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2840 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2841 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2842 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2843 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2844 in this area anymore).
2845
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002846- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2847 threading.Timer.
2848
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002849- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2850 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2851
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002852- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002853 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2854
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002855- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002856 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2857 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2858 converted to Python longs.
2859
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002860- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002861 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2862
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002863- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2864 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2865 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2866
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002867Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002868-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002869
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002870- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2871 division operators as per PEP 238.
2872
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002873Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002874-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002875
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002876- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2877 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2878 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2879 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2880
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002881C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002882-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002883
2884- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002885
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002886- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2887 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002888 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002889
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002890 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2891 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002892 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002893 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002894
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002895- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002896 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2897 module:
2898
2899 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002900
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002901 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2902 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002903
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002904 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2905 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002906
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002907 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2908
2909 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2910
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002911- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002912 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2913 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2914 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002915
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002916New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002917-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002918
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002919- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2920 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2921 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2922 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2923 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002924
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002925Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002926-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002927
2928Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002929-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002930
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002931- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2932 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2933 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2934 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002935 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2936 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2937 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2938 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2939 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002940
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002941- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002942 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2943
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002944
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002945What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2946===========================
2947
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002948*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2949
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002950Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002951-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002952
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002953- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2954 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2955
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002956- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2957 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2958 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002959
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002960- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2961 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2962 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2963 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002964
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002965- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2966
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002967- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002968
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002969Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002970-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002971
2972- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002973 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002974 the module docstring for details.
2975
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002976Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002977-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002978
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002979- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002980 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2981 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2982 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002983
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002984- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2985 Nick Mathewson.
2986
2987Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002988----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002989
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002990- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2991 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2992 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2993 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2994 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2995 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2996 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2997 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2998
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002999- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3000 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3001 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3002 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3003
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003004- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3005 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3006 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3007 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3008 come a long way).
3009
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003010- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3011 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3012 write filters for these warnings).
3013
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003014- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3015 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3016 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3017 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3018 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3019
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003020- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3021 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3022 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3023 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3024 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3025 older distribution.
3026
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003027Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003028-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003029
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003030- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3031 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003032 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003033
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003034- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3035 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3036 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3037
3038- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3039
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003040- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3041
3042- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3043
3044- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3045
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003046- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003047
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003048- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3049
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003050New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003051-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003052
3053C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003054-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003055
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003056- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3057 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3058 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3059 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3060 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3061 against buffer overruns.
3062
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003063- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003064 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3065 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003066 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3067 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3068 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3069
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003070- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3071 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3072 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3073 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3074 deprecated.
3075
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003076Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003077-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003078
3079- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3080 relevant is found.
3081
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003082
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003083What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003084===========================
3085
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003086*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3087
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003088Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003089----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003090
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003091- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3092 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3093 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3094 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3095 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3096 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3097 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3098 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003099 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003100 repaired.
3101
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003102- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003103 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003104 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3105 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3106 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3107 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3108 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3109 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3110 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3111 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3112
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003113- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3114 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3115 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3116 leading BMO character).
3117
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003118- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3119 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3120 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3121
3122 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3123 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3124 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003125
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003126 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3127 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3128 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3129 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3130 for various simple to use conversions.
3131
3132 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3133 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3134
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003135 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3136 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3137 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3138 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3139 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3140 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3141 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3142 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3143 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3144 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3145 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3146 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3147 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3148 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3149 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003150
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003151- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3152 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3153 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003154 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003155 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003156
3157 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003158 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3159 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3160 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3161 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3162 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003163 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3164 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003165
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003166 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3167 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3168 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003169 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003170
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003171- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3172 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3173 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3174 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3175 floating arithmetic,
3176
3177 x = 9007199254740992.0
3178 print long(x)
3179
3180 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3181 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3182 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3183 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3184 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3185 functions are of good quality).
3186
3187 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3188 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3189 algorithms to break.
3190
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003191- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3192 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3193 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3194 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3195 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3196 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3197 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3198 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3199 order.
3200
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003201- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3202 operation along the most common code paths.
3203
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003204- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3205 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3206
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003207- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3208 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3209 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3210 {}.update(UserDict())
3211
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003212- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3213 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3214 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3215 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3216 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3217 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3218 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3219 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3220
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003221- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003222 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003223
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003224 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003225 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3226 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003227 join() method of strings
3228 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003229 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3230 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003231 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003232 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003233
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003234- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3235 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3236
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003237- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3238 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3239
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003240- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3241 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3242 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3243 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3244
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003245- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3246 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003247 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003248 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3249 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003250
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003251- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3252
3253
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003254Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003255-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003256
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003257- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003258 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003259 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3260 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3261
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003262- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3263 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3264
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003265- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3266 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3267 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3268 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3269
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003270- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3271 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3272 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3273
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003274- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3275
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003276- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3277
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003278- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3279 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3280 that are still imported into string.py).
3281
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003282- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3283
3284- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3285 Now it does.
3286
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003287- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3288
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003289- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3290 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3291 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3292 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3293 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003294 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3295 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003296
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003297- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3298 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3299 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3300 'help(object)'.
3301
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003302Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003303-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003304
3305- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003306 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003307 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3308 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3309
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003310- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003311 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3312 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003313
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003314C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003315-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003316
3317- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3318 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003319
3320----
3321
3322**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**