blob: 9ce8c2d37956878eae8fa56b8a9236d99605b055 [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
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +000015- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
16 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
17 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
18 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
19 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
20
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +000021- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
22
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +000023- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
24 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
25
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +000026- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
27 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
28 modified the list.
29
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +000030- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
31 functions is now writable.
32
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +000033- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
34 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
35 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
36 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
37
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000038- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
39 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
40 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
41 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
42 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000043
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +000044- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
45 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
46
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000047Extension modules
48-----------------
49
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +000050- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
51 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
52 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
53 supposed to have been truncated away.
54
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +000055- Added socket.socketpair().
56
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000057Library
58-------
59
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +000060- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
61 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
62
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +000063- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
64
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +000065- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
66
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +000067- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
68
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +000069- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
70 Percivall.
71
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +000072- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
73 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
74
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +000075- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
76 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
77 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +000078 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +000079
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +000080- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
81 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
82 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
83 and exponent.
84
85- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
86
87- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
88 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
89 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
90
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +000091- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
92 to the readline module.
93
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +000094- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +000095 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
96 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +000097
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +000098- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
99 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
100 contains symlinks.
101
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000102- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
103 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
104
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000105- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
106 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
107 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
108
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000109- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
110 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
111 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
112 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
113 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
114 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
115 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
116 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
117 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
118 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
119 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
120 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
121 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
122
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000123- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
124
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000125Tools/Demos
126-----------
127
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000128- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
129 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
130
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000131- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
132
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000133Build
134-----
135
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000136- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
137 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
138
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000139- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
140 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
141
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000142- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
143 GNU/k*BSD systems.
144
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000145- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
146 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
147
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000148C API
149-----
150
151Documentation
152-------------
153
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000154- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
155 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
156
157- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
158 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
159 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000160
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000161New platforms
162-------------
163
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000164- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
165
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000166Tests
167-----
168
169Windows
170-------
171
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000172- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
173 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
174 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
175 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
176 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
177 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
178 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
179 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
180 the problem.
181
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000182Mac
183---
184
185
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000186What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
187=================================
188
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000189*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000190
191Core and builtins
192-----------------
193
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000194- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
195 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
196 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
197 sensitive code.
198
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000199- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
200 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
201 @staticmethod
202 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000203 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000204
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000205- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
206 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
207 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
208 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
209 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
210 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
211 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
212 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
213 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
214 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
215 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
216
217 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
218 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
219 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
220 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
221 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
222 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
223 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
224
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000225- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
226 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
227
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000228- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000229 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000230
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000231- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000232 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000233 which was missing for no apparent reason.
234
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000235- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000236 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
237 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
238
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000239- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
240 types that support garbage collection.
241
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000242- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
243
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000244- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
245 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
246 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
247 Jython.
248
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000249- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
250
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000251- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
252 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
253
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000254- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
255 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
256 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000257
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000258- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
259 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
260 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
261
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000262Extension modules
263-----------------
264
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000265- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
266
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000267Library
268-------
269
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000270- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
271 TIS-620
272
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000273- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
274 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
275 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
276 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
277 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
278 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
279 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
280 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
281 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
282 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
283
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000284- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
285
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000286- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
287 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
288 same as when the argument is omitted).
289 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
290
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000291- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
292
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000293- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
294 schemes are offered.
295
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000296- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
297
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000298- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
299 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
300 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
301
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000302- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
303
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000304- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
305 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
306
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000307- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
308 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
309 when dummy_threading is being used.
310
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000311- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
312 from a tarfile.
313
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000314- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000315 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000316
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000317- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
318 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
319 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
320 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
321
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000322- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
323 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
324
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000325- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
326 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
327 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
328 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
329 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
330 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
331 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
332 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
333 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
334 by some other method in progress).
335
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000336- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
337 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
338 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000339
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000340- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
341
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000342- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
343 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
344 AM Kuchling.
345
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000346- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
347 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
348 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
349
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000350- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
351 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
352 instead of unsigned.
353
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000354- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000355 no longer part of the public API.
356
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000357- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
358 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
359 string methods of the same name).
360
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000361- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000362 SF patch 945642.
363
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000364- doctest unittest integration improvements:
365
366 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
367
368 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
369 DocTestSuites.
370
371- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
372 that provide thread-local data.
373
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000374- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
375 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
376
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000377- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
378
379- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
380 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
381 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
382
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000383- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
384
385 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
386 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
387 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000388
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000389 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
390 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
391 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
392 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
393
394 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
395 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
396
397 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
398 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
399 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
400 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
401
402 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
403 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
404 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
405 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
406 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
407
408 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
409 wrapping help output.
410
411 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
412 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
413 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000414
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000415C API
416-----
417
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000418- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
419 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
420 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
421 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
422 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
423 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
424 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
425 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
426 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
427 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
428 its visible semantics have not changed.
429
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000430- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
431 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
432
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000433Documentation
434-------------
435
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000436- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000437
438 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000439 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000440
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000441 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000442
443 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
444
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000445- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000446
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000447Tests
448-----
449
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000450- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000451 platforms that use the Makefile.
452
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000453- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
454 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
455 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
456
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000457
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000458What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
459=================================
460
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000461*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000462
463Core and builtins
464-----------------
465
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000466- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
467 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
468 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
469 objects now (one object instead of three).
470
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000471- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
472 Windows DLLs.
473
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000474- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
475 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000476
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000477- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
478 a new .pyc magic.
479
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000480- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
481 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
482 be there.
483
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000484- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
485 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
486 the LC_NUMERIC category.
487
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000488- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
489 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
490 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
491
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000492- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
493
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000494- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
495 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
496 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000497
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000498- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
499 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
500
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000501- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
502
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000503- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000504 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000505
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000506- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
507
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000508- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
509
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000510- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
511 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
512
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000513- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
514 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
515 Fixes bug #858016 .
516
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000517- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
518 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
519 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
520
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000521- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
522 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
523 improves their performance (about 35%).
524
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000525- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
526 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
527 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
528
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000529- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
530 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
531 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
532 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
533
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000534- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
535 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
536 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
537 length is not known).
538
539- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
540 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000541 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
542 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000543 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
544
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000545- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
546 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
547
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000548- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
549 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
550 keyword arguments.
551
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000552- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
553 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
554 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
555
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000556- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
557 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
558 cases.
559
560- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
561 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
562 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
563 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
564 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
565 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
566 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
567 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
568 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
569 a release build.
570
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000571- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
572 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
573
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000574- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000575 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000576
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000577- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
578 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
579 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
580 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
581 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
582 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
583 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
584 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
585 destroyed.
586
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000587- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
588 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
589 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
590 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
591 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
592 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
593 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
594 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
595
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000596- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
597 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
598 character other than a space.
599
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000600- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
601 by the function object or by the method object, the function
602 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
603 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
604 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
605 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
606 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
607 attributes with the same name.
608
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000609- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
610 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
611 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
612 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
613 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
614 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
615 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
616 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
617 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
618 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
619 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
620 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
621 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
622 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000623
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000624- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
625 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
626 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
627 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
628 This has been repaired.
629
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000630- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
631
632- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
633
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000634- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
635 over a sequence.
636
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000637- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000638 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000639
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000640- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
641
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000642- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
643 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
644 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
645 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
646 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
647 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
648 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
649 records with equal keys is unchanged).
650
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000651- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
652 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
653 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
654
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000655- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
656 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
657 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
658 freelist.
659
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000660- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
661 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
662
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000663- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
664 number.
665
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000666- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
667 a TypeError exception.
668
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000669- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
670 820195.
671
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000672- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
673 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
674 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
675
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000676- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000677 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
678 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000679
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000680- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
681 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
682 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
683
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000684- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
685 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000686 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000687
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000688- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000689 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
690 the first call.
691
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000692
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000693Extension modules
694-----------------
695
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000696- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
697 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
698
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000699- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
700 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
701 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
702 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
703 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
704 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
705 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000706
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000707- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
708
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000709- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
710
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000711- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
712 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
713
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000714- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
715 fewer false positives.
716
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000717- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
718 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
719
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000720- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000721 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
722
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000723- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000724 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000725 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
726 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
727 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000728
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000729- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
730 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
731 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
732 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
733
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000734- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
735 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
736 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
737 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
738 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
739 #897625.
740
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000741- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
742 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
743
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000744- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
745 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
746 and pops on either side of the deque.
747
748- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
749 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
750
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000751- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
752 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
753 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
754 other functions that expect a function argument.
755
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000756- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
757
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000758- os.getsid was added.
759
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000760- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
761 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
762 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
763
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000764- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
765
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000766- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
767
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000768- readline.clear_history was added.
769
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000770- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
771
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000772- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
773
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000774- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
775
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000776- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
777
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000778- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
779
780- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
781
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000782- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
783
784- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
785
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000786- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
787 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
788 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
789
790- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
791 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
792 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
793 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
794 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
795 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
796 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
797
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000798- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
799 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
800 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
801 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000802
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000803- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000804 iterators from a single iterable.
805
806- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
807 of raising a TypeError exception.
808
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000809- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
810 as parameter.
811
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000812Library
813-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000814
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000815- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
816 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
817 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000818
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000819- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
820 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
821 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000822
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000823- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000824
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000825- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
826 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000827
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000828- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
829 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
830
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000831- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
832
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000833- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000834 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000835
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000836- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
837 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
838
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000839- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
840
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000841- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
842 on cygwin and mingw32.
843
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000844- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
845
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000846- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
847 module.
848
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000849- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
850 installation scheme for all platforms.
851
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000852- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000853 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000854
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000855- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
856 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
857 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
858
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000859- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
860 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
861 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
862
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000863- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
864
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000865- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
866
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000867- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
868 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
869
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000870- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
871 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
872 type pattern with the same value exists.
873
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000874- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
875 when run from the command prompt).
876
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000877- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
878 not taken into consideration when caching value.
879
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000880- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
881 default sort).
882
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000883- Added global runctx function to profile module
884
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000885- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
886
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000887- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
888
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000889- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
890
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000891- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000892 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
893 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
894 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
895 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
896 accordingly.
897
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000898- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
899 decoding standards.
900
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000901- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
902 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
903 called for all requests.
904
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000905- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
906 they are passed to the compiler.
907
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000908- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
909 indent, width and depth.
910
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000911- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
912 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
913
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000914- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
915 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
916
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000917- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
918
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000919- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
920
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000921- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
922
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000923- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
924 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
925
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000926- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000927 for better performance.
928
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000929- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000930
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000931- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
932 a string).
933
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000934- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
935
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000936- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
937
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000938- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
939
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000940- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
941
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000942- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
943 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
944 list of fieldnames.
945
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000946- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
947 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
948
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000949- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
950
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000951- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
952 empty lists.
953
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000954- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
955 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
956 and shelves.
957
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000958- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
959 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
960
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000961- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000962 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
963 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000964
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000965- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
966 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000967 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000968
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000969- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000970 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
971 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
972
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000973- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
974 and removed in Py2.4.
975
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000976- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
977
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000978- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
979
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000980Tools/Demos
981-----------
982
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000983- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
984 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
985
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000986- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
987
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000988- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
989 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
990 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
991 destination in situations where both files are given.
992
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000993- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
994 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
995 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
996 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
997
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000998- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
999
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001000- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1001 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1002 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1003 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1004 now.
1005
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001006- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1007 in effect
1008
1009- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1010 C-c C-h
1011
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001012- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1013 -d option was given.
1014
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001015Build
1016-----
1017
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001018- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1019 build under OS X.
1020
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001021- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1022 --enable-profiling.
1023
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001024- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1025 is configured --with-tsc.
1026
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001027- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1028 on AMD64.
1029
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001030- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1031 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1032
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001033- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1034 removed.
1035
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001036- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1037 supported (see PEP 11).
1038
1039- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1040
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001041- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1042
1043- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1044 (see PEP 11).
1045
1046- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1047 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1048
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001049C API
1050-----
1051
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001052- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1053 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1054 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1055
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001056- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1057 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1058 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1059 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1060
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001061- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1062 generator objects.
1063
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001064- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1065 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001066 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1067 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001068
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001069- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1070 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1071
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001072- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1073 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1074 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1075 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1076 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1077
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001078- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1079 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1080 about 10% faster.
1081
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001082- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1083 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1084
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001085- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1086 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1087 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1088 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1089
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001090Windows
1091-------
1092
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001093- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1094 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1095 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1096 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1097
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001098- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1099 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1100 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1101
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001102
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001103What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1104===============================
1105
1106*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1107
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001108IDLE
1109----
1110
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001111- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1112 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1113 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1114 context-menu actions.
1115
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001116- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1117 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1118 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1119 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1120 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1121 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1122 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1123 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1124 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1125
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001126
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001127What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1128=============================================
1129
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001130*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001131
1132Core and builtins
1133-----------------
1134
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001135- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001136 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001137 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1138
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001139Extension modules
1140-----------------
1141
1142- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1143 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1144 than once. This has been fixed.
1145
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001146- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1147 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1148 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1149 call.
1150
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001151- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1152
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001153Library
1154-------
1155
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001156- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1157 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1158
1159- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1160 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1161 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1162 restored.
1163
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001164IDLE
1165----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001166
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001167- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001168
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001169Build
1170-----
1171
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001172- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1173 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1174
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001175C API
1176-----
1177
1178Windows
1179-------
1180
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001181- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1182 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1183
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001184- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1185
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001186Mac
1187---
1188
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001189- Various fixes to pimp.
1190
1191- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1192
1193- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1194 more problems than it solves.
1195
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001196
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001197What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1198=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001199
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001200*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1201
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001202Core and builtins
1203-----------------
1204
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001205- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1206 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1207
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001208- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1209 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001210 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001211
1212- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1213 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1214 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001215 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001216
1217- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1218 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001219
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001220- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1221 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1222 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1223
1224- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001225 770247.
1226
1227- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001228
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001229Extension modules
1230-----------------
1231
1232- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1233 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1234
1235- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1236
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001237- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1238
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001239- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1240 contained within the _strptime module.
1241
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001242- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1243 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1244
1245- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001246 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1247
1248- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1249 the find_class attribute, if present.
1250
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001251- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001252
1253 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1254 (SF bug 763298).
1255
1256 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001257 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1258 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1259 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001260
1261 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1262
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001263Library
1264-------
1265
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001266- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1267
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001268- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1269 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1270 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1271 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1272 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1273 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1274 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1275 or Tester().
1276
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001277- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1278 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1279 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1280 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1281 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1282 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1283 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1284 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1285 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001286
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001287 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001288
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001289- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1290 weren't before was an oversight.
1291
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001292- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1293 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1294
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001295- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1296 when there are no lines.
1297
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001298- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1299 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1300
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001301- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1302 to child processes.
1303
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001304- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1305
1306- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1307
1308- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1309 xmlrpclib.
1310
1311- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1312 responses.
1313
1314- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1315 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1316
1317- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1318 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1319 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1320
1321- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1322 used as patterns.
1323
1324- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1325 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1326 than Tk 8.3.
1327
1328- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1329
1330- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001331
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001332Tools/Demos
1333-----------
1334
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001335- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1336
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001337- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1338
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001339- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001340
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001341Build
1342-----
1343
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001344- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1345
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001346- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1347
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001348- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1349 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001350
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001351- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1352 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1353 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001354
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001355C API
1356-----
1357
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001358- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1359 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1360
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001361Windows
1362-------
1363
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001364- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1365 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1366 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1367 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1368 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1369 Python exception ::
1370
1371 thread.error: can't start new thread
1372
1373 is raised now.
1374
1375- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1376 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1377 instead of from DLL teardown.
1378
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001379Mac
1380---
1381
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001382- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001383 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001384 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1385 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1386 the executable in the bundle.
1387
1388- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001389
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001390- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1391
1392- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1393 on Panther.
1394
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001395What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1396================================
1397
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001398*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001399
1400Core and builtins
1401-----------------
1402
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001403- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1404 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1405 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1406 with the -i option.
1407
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001408- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1409 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1410
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001411- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1412 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1413
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001414- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1415 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1416 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1417 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1418 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1419 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1420 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1421 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1422 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1423 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1424 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1425 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1426 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001427
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001428- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1429 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1430 embedded in a lambda expression.
1431
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001432- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1433 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1434 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1435 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1436 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1437
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001438- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1439 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1440 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1441
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001442- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1443 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1444
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001445- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1446 It's writable again.
1447
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001448- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1449 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1450 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001451 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001452
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001453- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1454 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1455 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1456
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001457Extension modules
1458-----------------
1459
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001460- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1461 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1462
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001463- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1464 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1465 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1466 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1467
1468- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1469 collection.
1470
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001471- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1472 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1473 unique within a single program run.
1474
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001475- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1476 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1477
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001478- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1479 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1480
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001481- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1482 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001483
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001484- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1485
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001486- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1487 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1488
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001489- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1490 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1491 for many BSD-derived systems.
1492
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001493
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001494Library
1495-------
1496
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001497- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1498 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1499 primary ones:
1500
1501 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1502 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1503 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1504
1505 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1506 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1507 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1508 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1509 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1510 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1511
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001512- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1513 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1514 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1515 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1516 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1517 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1518 argument.
1519
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001520- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1521 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1522 in the archive.
1523
1524- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1525 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1526
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001527- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1528 569574).
1529
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001530- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1531 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1532 no more.
1533
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001534- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1535 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1536 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1537 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1538 code coverage.
1539
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001540- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1541 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1542 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001543 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1544 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001545
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001546- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1547 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1548 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001549 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001550
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001551- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1552
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001553- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1554 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1555 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1556 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1557
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001558- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1559 handling.
1560
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001561- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1562 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1563
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001564- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1565 in socket.py.
1566
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001567- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1568
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001569- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1570 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1571 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1572 opener with proxy support.
1573
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001574- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1575
1576- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1577
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001578Tools/Demos
1579-----------
1580
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001581- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1582
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001583- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1584
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001585- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1586 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001587
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001588- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1589 files.
1590
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001591Build
1592-----
1593
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001594- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001595 different root directory.
1596
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001597C API
1598-----
1599
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001600- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1601 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1602 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1603 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1604 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1605 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1606 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1607 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1608 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1609 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1610
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001611- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1612 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1613 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1614 from Python.
1615
1616
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001617New platforms
1618-------------
1619
1620None this time.
1621
1622Tests
1623-----
1624
1625- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1626 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1627
1628Windows
1629-------
1630
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001631- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1632
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001633- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1634 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1635 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1636 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1637 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1638 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1639 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1640 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1641 that's what it's for.
1642
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001643Mac
1644---
1645
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001646- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1647 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1648 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1649 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001650- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1651 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1652- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001653
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001654SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1655------------------------------------
1656
1657430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1658598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1659622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1660661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1661683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1662697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1663713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1664724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1665727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1666729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1667730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1668731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1669732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1670733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1671735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1672740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1673744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1674745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1675747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1676749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1677751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1678753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1679755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1680757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1681760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1682
1683
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001684What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1685================================
1686
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001687*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001688
1689Core and builtins
1690-----------------
1691
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001692- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1693 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1694
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001695- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1696 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1697 and cannot be strings).
1698
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001699- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1700 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1701 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1702 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1703
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001704- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1705 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1706 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1707 Python itself.
1708
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001709- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1710 the referenced object, if it has one.
1711
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001712- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1713 the thread started at
1714 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1715
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001716- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1717 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1718 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1719 placed on a list index.
1720
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001721- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1722 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1723 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1724 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1725
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001726- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1727 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1728 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1729 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1730 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1731 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1732 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1733
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001734- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1735 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1736 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1737 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1738 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1739
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001740- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1741 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001742
1743- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1744 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1745 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1746 #693195.)
1747
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001748- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1749 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001750
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001751- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001752 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001753 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1754 interpreter executions, would fail.
1755
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001756- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001757 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001758 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001759
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001760Extension modules
1761-----------------
1762
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001763- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1764 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1765 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1766 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1767
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001768- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1769 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1770
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001771- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1772 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1773 and Greg Chapman.)
1774
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001775- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1776 recursively.
1777
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001778- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001779 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1780 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1781 leaks.
1782
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001783- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1784
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001785- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1786 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1787 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1788 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1789 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1790 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1791 #705836.
1792
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001793- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001794 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1795
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001796- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1797 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1798 See SF bug #692416.
1799
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001800- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1801 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1802
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001803- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1804 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1805 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001806
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001807- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001808 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1809 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1810
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001811- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1812 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1813 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1814 timeouts to work properly.
1815
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001816Library
1817-------
1818
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001819- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1820 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1821 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1822 future release.
1823
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001824- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1825 for querying platform dependent features.
1826
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001827- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001828
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001829- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1830 pickle protocol versions.
1831
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001832- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1833 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1834 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1835
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001836- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1837
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001838- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1839 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1840 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1841 modules.
1842
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001843- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1844 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1845 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1846
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001847- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1848 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1849
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001850- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1851 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1852 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1853
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001854- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001855 MS Office extensions.
1856
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001857- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1858 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1859
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001860- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1861 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1862
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001863- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1864 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1865 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1866 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1867 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1868 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1869
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001870- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1871 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1872 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001873
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001874- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1875 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1876 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1877
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001878- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1879
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001880- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1881 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1882 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1883
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001884Tools/Demos
1885-----------
1886
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001887- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1888 See the module docstring for details.
1889
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001890Build
1891-----
1892
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001893- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1894 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001895
1896C API
1897-----
1898
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001899- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1900
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001901- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1902 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1903 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1904
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001905- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1906 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001907
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001908 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1909 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1910 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001911
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001912- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001913 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1914
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001915- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1916 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1917 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001918
1919New platforms
1920-------------
1921
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001922None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001923
1924Tests
1925-----
1926
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001927- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1928 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001929
1930Windows
1931-------
1932
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001933- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1934 function.
1935
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001936- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1937 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001938
1939Mac
1940---
1941
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001942- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1943 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001944
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001945- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1946 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001947
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001948- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1949 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1950 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001951
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001952- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001953 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1954 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001955
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001956- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1957 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001958
1959
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001960What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1961=================================
1962
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001963*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001964
1965Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001966-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001967
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001968- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1969 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1970 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1971
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001972- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1973 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1974 (SF patch #664376.)
1975
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001976- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1977 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1978 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1979 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1980 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1981 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001982 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001983
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001984- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1985 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1986 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1987 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001988 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001989
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001990- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1991 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1992 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1993 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1994 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1995 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1996 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1997 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1998 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1999 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2000 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2001
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002002- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2003 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2004 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2005 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2006 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2007 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2008
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002009- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2010 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2011
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002012- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2013 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2014 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2015 case.)
2016
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002017- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2018 passed as unicode strings.
2019
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002020- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2021 See SF bug #683467.
2022
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002023- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2024 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2025
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002026- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2027
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002028- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2029
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002030- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2031 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2032 arguments.
2033
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002034- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2035 See SF bug #667147.
2036
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002037- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002038 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002039 See SF bug #676155.
2040
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002041- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002042 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002043 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2044 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2045 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2046 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2047 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2048 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002049
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002050Extension modules
2051-----------------
2052
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002053- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2054 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2055 tp_as_number pointer.
2056
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002057- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2058 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2059 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2060 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2061 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2062
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002063- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2064
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002065- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2066
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002067- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002068 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002069 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2070 patch #678531.)
2071
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002072- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2073 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2074
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002075- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2076 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2077
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002078- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2079
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002080- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2081 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2082 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2083
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002084- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2085
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002086- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2087 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2088
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002089- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002090
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002091- datetime changes:
2092
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002093 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2094
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002095 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2096 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2097 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2098 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2099 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2100 now.
2101
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002102 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002103 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2104 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002105
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002106 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002107 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002108 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2109 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2110 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2111 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002112
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002113 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2114 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2115 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002116 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2117
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002118 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2119 by a later example coded by Guido.
2120
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002121 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002122 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2123 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2124 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002125 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2126 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2127
2128 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2129 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2130 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2131 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2132 tzinfo subclass instance.
2133
2134 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2135 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2136 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2137 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2138 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2139 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2140 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2141 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002142
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002143 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2144 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2145 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2146 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2147 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002148 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2149
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002150 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002151
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002152 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2153 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2154 as a naive datetime object.
2155
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002156 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2157 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2158 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2159
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002160 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2161 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2162 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2163 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2164 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2165 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2166 comparison.
2167
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002168 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2169 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2170 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2171 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002172 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002173
2174 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002175
2176 and ::
2177
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002178 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2179
2180 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2181 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2182 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2183 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2184
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002185 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2186 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2187 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2188 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2189 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2190
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002191 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2192 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002193 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2194 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002195
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002196Library
2197-------
2198
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002199- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2200 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2201
2202- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2203 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2204 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2205 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2206 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2207 See PEP 307 for details.
2208
2209- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2210 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2211
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002212- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2213 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002214 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002215 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2216 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002217 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002218
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002219- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2220 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2221
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002222- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2223 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2224 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2225
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002226- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2227
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002228- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2229 exception.
2230
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002231- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2232 class.
2233
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002234- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2235 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2236 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2237
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002238- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2239 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2240
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002241- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002242 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2243 See SF bug #659228.
2244
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002245- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2246 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2247 See SF patch #651082.
2248
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002249- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002250
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002251- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2252 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2253
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002254- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002255 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002256
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002257- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2258 DOS paths from other platforms.
2259
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002260Tools/Demos
2261-----------
2262
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002263- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2264 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2265 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2266 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2267 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2268 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2269 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2270 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2271 example:
2272
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002273 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2274 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002275
2276 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2277
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002278
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002279Build
2280-----
2281
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002282- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2283 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2284 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002285 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2286
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002287 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2288
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002289- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2290 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2291 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2292 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2293 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2294 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2295 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2296 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2297 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2298
2299- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2300 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2301 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2302 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2303
2304- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2305 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2306
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002307C API
2308-----
2309
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002310- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2311 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002312
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002313- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2314 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2315 tp_as_number pointer.
2316
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002317- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2318 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2319 (SF #681367)
2320
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002321- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2322 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2323 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2324 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002325
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002326Tests
2327-----
2328
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002329- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002330 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2331 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2332 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2333 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2334 pydoc.)
2335
2336- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2337
2338- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002339
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002340Windows
2341-------
2342
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002343- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2344 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2345 time).
2346
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002347- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2348 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2349
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002350- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2351 release without strong cryptography.
2352
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002353- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002354 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002355
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002356- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2357 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2358
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002359Mac
2360---
2361
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002362- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2363 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002364
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002365- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2366 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2367 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002368
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002369- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2370 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002371
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002372- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2373 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2374 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2375 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002376
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002377- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002378 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2379 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2380 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002381
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002382
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002383What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002384=================================
2385
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002386*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002387
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002388Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002389--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002390
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002391- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2392
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002393- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2394 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002395 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002396 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002397 a different meaning than before.
2398
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002399- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002400 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002401 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002402
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002403- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002404 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002405 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002406
2407- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2408 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2409 and deallocation.
2410
2411- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2412 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2413
2414- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2415 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2416 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2417 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2418 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2419
2420- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2421 now detected by the garbage collector.
2422
2423- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2424 [SF bug 519621]
2425
2426- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2427 identifier.
2428
2429- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2430 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2431 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2432 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2433 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2434 [SF bug 563060]
2435
2436- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2437 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2438 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2439 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2440 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2441
2442- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2443 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2444 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2445
2446- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2447
2448- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2449 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2450 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2451 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2452 state of the slots would be lost.)
2453
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002454Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002455-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002456
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002457- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002458 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2459 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2460 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2461 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002462 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2463 Jython 2.1.
2464
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002465- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002466 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002467 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2468 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2469 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2470 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2471 these, see PEP 302.
2472
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002473- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2474 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2475 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2476
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002477- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2478 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2479 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2480
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002481- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2482 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2483 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2484
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002485- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2486 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2487 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2488 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2489 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2490 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2491 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2492 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2493 releases or implementations.
2494
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002495- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002496 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2497 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002498
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002499- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2500 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2501
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002502- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2503 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2504 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2505
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002506- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2507 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2508
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002509- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2510 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002511 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2512 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002513
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002514- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2515 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2516 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2517 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2518 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2519
2520 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2521 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2522 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2523 pattern.
2524
2525 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2526 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2527 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2528 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2529
2530 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2531 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2532 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2533 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2534 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2535 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2536
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002537- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2538 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2539 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2540 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2541 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2542 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2543 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2544 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002545
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002546- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2547 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2548 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2549 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2550 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002551 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2552 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2553 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2554 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2555 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2556 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2557 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002558
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002559- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2560 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2561
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002562- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2563 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2564 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2565 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2566 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2567 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2568 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2569 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2570 to Zack Weinberg!
2571
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002572- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2573 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2574 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2575 type. This has been fixed now.
2576
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002577- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2578 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2579 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2580
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002581- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2582 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2583 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2584 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2585 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2586 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2587 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2588 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002589 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002590
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002591- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2592 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2593 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002594
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002595- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2596 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2597 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2598 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2599 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2600 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2601 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2602 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002603 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002604 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2605 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2606
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002607- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2608 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2609 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2610 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2611 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2612 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2613 this.)
2614
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002615- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2616 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002617 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002618 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002619 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2620 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002621 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2622 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002623
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002624- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2625 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2626 currently running.
2627
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002628- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2629 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2630 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2631 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2632
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002633- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2634 as directory names.
2635
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002636- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2637 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2638
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002639- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2640 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2641
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002642- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002643 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2644 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002645
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002646- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2647 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2648 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2649 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2650 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2651
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002652- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2653 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2654 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2655 removed.
2656
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002657- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2658 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2659 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2660
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002661- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2662 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2663 to __debug__.
2664
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002665- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2666 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2667 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2668
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002669- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2670 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2671 deprecated now.
2672
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002673- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2674 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2675 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002676
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002677- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2678 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2679 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2680 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2681 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002682
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002683- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2684 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2685
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002686- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2687 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2688 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002689 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002690 is backward compatible.
2691
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002692- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2693 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2694 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2695 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2696 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2697
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002698- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2699 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2700 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2701 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2702 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2703 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002704
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002705- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2706 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2707
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002708- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2709 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2710
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002711- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2712 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2713 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2714 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2715 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2716
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002717- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2718 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2719 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2720
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002721- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002722 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2723
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002724- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2725 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2726 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002727
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002728- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2729 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2730
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002731- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2732 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2733 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2734
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002735- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2736
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002737Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002738-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002739
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002740- Added three operators to the operator module:
2741 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2742 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2743 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2744
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002745- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2746
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002747- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2748 archives.
2749
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002750- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2751 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2752 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2753
2754 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2755
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002756- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2757 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2758 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002759 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002760
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002761- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2762 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2763 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2764 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002765 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2766 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2767 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2768 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002769
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002770- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2771 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002772
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002773- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2774
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002775- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2776 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2777
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002778- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2779 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2780 supported.
2781
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002782- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2783
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002784- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2785 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002786
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002787- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2788 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2789
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002790- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2791
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002792- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2793 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2794
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002795- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2796 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2797 functions but callable type objects.
2798
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002799- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002800 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002801 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002802
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002803- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2804 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002805
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002806- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2807 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002808
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002809- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2810 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2811 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2812 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2813
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002814- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2815 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002816
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002817- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2818 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2819 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2820 and __imul__.
2821
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002822- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002823 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2824 is called.
2825
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002826- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2827 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2828 interpreter was compiled.
2829
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002830- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2831 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2832 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002833 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002834 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2835 1, not 2.
2836
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002837- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2838 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2839 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2840 limit.
2841
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002842- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2843 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2844 bug #623464.
2845
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002846- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2847 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2848 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2849 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2850
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002851Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002852-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002853
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002854- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2855
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002856- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2857 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2858 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2859 with Python 2.3a2.
2860
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002861- os.path exposes getctime.
2862
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002863- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002864 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002865 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002866 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002867 unit tests of floating point results.
2868
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002869- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2870 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2871 has been increased.
2872
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002873- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2874 executed.
2875
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002876- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2877 postinstallation script.
2878
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002879- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2880 test the current module.
2881
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002882- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002883 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2884 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2885 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2886 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2887
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002888- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002889 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002890 Ward's Optik package.
2891
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002892- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2893 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2894 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2895 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2896
2897- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2898 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002899 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002900
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002901- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2902 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2903 shelf are binary pickles.
2904
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002905- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2906 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2907
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002908- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2909 modules are iterators now.
2910
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002911- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2912 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2913 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2914 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2915 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2916 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002917
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002918- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2919 with their entity value.
2920
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002921- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2922
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002923- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2924 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002925
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002926- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2927 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002928 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002929
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002930- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2931 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2932 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2933 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2934 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2935 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2936 main():
2937
2938 import locale
2939 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2940
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002941- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2942 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2943
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002944- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2945 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2946 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2947 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2948 to the new standard.
2949
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002950- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2951 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2952 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2953 an extension to the database.
2954
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002955- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2956 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2957 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2958 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002959 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002960
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002961- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002962 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002963
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002964- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2965 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2966 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2967 bounded integers.
2968
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002969- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2970 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2971 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2972 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2973 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2974 in existence.
2975
2976 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2977 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2978 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2979 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2980 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2981 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2982
2983 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2984 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2985 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2986 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2987
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002988- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2989 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2990 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2991
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002992- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2993
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002994- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2995 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2996 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2997 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2998
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002999- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3000 argument.
3001
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003002- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3003 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3004 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3005 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3006 [SF patch 560794].
3007
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003008- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3009 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3010 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003011 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3012 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3013 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003014
3015- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3016 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003017
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003018- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3019 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3020 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3021 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003022
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003023- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3024 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3025 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3026 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3027 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3028
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003029- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003030
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003031- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3032
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003033- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3034 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3035 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3036 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3037 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3038 identical to None.
3039
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003040- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3041 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3042 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3043 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3044 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3045 results now.
3046
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003047- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3048 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3049
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003050- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3051 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3052 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3053 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3054 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3055 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3056 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3057 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3058
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003059- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3060
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003061- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3062 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3063
3064- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3065 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3066 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3067 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3068 and other systems.
3069
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003070- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3071 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3072 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3073 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 +00003074 work well with these.
3075
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003076- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3077
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003078- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003079 connections.
3080
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003081- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3082 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3083 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3084
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003085- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3086 sets
3087
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003088- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3089 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3090 name.
3091
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003092- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3093 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3094 passed in.
3095
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003096- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003097 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003098 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3099 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003100
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003101- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3102
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003103- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3104
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003105- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3106 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3107 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3108
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003109- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3110 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3111 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3112 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003113 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003114
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003115- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003116 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003117 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003118
3119- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3120 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3121 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3122
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003123- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003124 the value of its expression argument.
3125
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003126- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3127 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3128 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3129
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003130- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3131 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3132 skipstone browser was included.
3133
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003134- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3135 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3136
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003137Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003138-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003139
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003140- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3141 names in addition to accepting file names.
3142
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003143- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3144 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3145 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3146 still used and useful.)
3147
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003148- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3149 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3150 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3151 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003152
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003153- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3154 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3155 the generated binary.
3156
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003157Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003158-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003159
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003160- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3161
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003162- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3163 except in the hands of experts.
3164
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003165- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003166 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3167 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3168 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003169
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003170- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3171 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3172 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3173 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3174 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3175 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3176 builds.
3177
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003178- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3179 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3180 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3181 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3182 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3183 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3184 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3185 new type.
3186
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003187- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003188
3189 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3190 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3191 positive infinities.
3192
3193 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3194 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3195 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3196 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3197 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3198 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3199 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3200
3201 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3202
3203 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3204
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003205- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3206 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3207 size of the executable.
3208
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003209- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3210 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3211 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3212 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003213
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003214- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3215
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003216- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3217 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3218 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003219
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003220- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3221 well as Unix.
3222
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003223- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3224 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3225 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3226 modules in the README file for details.
3227
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003228C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003229-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003230
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003231- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3232 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003233 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003234 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003235 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003236
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003237- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3238 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3239 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3240 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3241 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3242 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003243 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003244 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3245 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3246 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3247 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3248 aligned.)
3249
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003250- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3251 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3252 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3253
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003254- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3255 level.
3256
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003257- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3258 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3259 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3260 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3261 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3262
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003263- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3264 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3265 code.
3266
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003267- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3268 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3269 adjusting for negative indices.
3270
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003271- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3272 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3273 object.
3274
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003275- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3276 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3277 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3278
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003279- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3280 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003281
3282- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3283
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003284- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3285 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3286 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3287 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3288
3289- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3290
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003291- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003292
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003293- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003294 without going through the buffer API.
3295
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003296- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003297
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003298- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3299 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3300 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3301 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3302
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003303- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3304 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3305
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003306- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003307 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3308
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003309New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003310-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003311
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003312- OpenVMS is now supported.
3313
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003314- AtheOS is now supported.
3315
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003316- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3317
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003318- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3319
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003320Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003321-----
3322
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003323- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3324 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3325 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003326
3327Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003328-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003329
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003330- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3331 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3332 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3333 bugs.
3334 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003335 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003336 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3337 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003338 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003339
3340- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003341 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003342
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003343- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3344 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3345
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003346- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3347 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003348 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003349 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3350
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003351- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3352 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3353 use files" uninstall option).
3354
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003355- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3356
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003357- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3358 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3359
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003360- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3361 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3362 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3363
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003364- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3365 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3366 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3367 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3368 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003369 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3370 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3371 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003372
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003373- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003374 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003375 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3376 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3377 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3378 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3379 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3380 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3381 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3382 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3383 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3384 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3385 work around.
3386
3387- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3388 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3389 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3390 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3391 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3392 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3393 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3394 specified with O_CREAT too).
3395
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003396Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003397----
3398
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003399- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003400
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003401- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3402 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3403 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3404
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003405- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3406 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3407 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3408
3409- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3410 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3411 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3412 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3413 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3414 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3415 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3416 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003417
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003418- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3419 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3420 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003421
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003422- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3423 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3424 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3425 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3426 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003427
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003428- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3429 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3430 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003431
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003432- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3433 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003434
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003435- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3436 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3437 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3438 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3439 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003440
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003441- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3442 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3443 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3444
3445- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3446 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3447 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003448
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003449- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3450 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3451 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3452 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003453 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003454
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003455- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3456 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003457
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003458- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3459 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003460
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003461- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003462 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003463 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3464 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003465
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003466
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003467What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003468===============================
3469
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003470*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3471
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003472Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003473--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003474
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003475- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3476 with a custom metaclass.
3477
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003478Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003479-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003480
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003481- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3482 are proxies.
3483
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003484Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003485-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003486
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003487- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3488 very short strings.
3489
3490- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3491 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3492 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3493 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3494 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3495
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003496Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003497-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003498
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003499- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3500 close or delete time).
3501
3502- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3503 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3504
3505- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3506
3507- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003508 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003509
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003510Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003511-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003512
3513Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003514-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003515
3516C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003517-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003518
3519New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003520-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003521
3522Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003523-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003524
3525Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003526-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003527
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003528- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3529
3530- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3531 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3532
3533- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3534 deleted at process exit time.
3535
3536- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3537 in backslash.
3538
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003539Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003540----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003541
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003542- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3543 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3544 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3545
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003546
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003547What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003548===========================
3549
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003550*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3551
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003552Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003553--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003554
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003555- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3556 been extensively updated. See
3557
3558 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3559
3560 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3561
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003562- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3563 deleted!
3564
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003565- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3566 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3567 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3568 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3569 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3570
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003571- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3572
3573 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3574 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3575
3576 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3577 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3578 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3579 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3580 supported anyway.
3581
3582 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3583 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3584
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003585- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3586 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3587 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3588 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3589 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003590
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003591- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3592 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3593 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3594
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003595Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003596-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003597
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003598- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3599 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3600 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3601 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3602 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3603 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003604 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3605 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3606 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3607 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003608
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003609- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3610 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3611 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3612
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003613Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003614-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003615
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003616- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3617
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003618Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003619-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003620
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003621- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3622 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3623 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3624 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3625 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3626 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3627
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003628- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3629
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003630- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3631
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003632- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3633
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003634- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3635 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3636 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3637
3638- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3639
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003640Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003641-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003642
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003643- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3644 off a search on Google.
3645
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003646Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003647-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003648
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003649- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3650 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3651 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3652 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3653 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3654 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3655 other platforms should do likewise.
3656
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003657- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3658 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3659 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3660
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003661C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003662-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003663
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003664- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3665 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3666 producing key-value pairs.
3667
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003668- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003669 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003670 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3671 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3672 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3673 previously went unchallenged.
3674
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003675New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003676-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003677
3678Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003679-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003680
3681Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003682-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003683
3684Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003685----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003686
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003687- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3688 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003689
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003690- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3691 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3692 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3693 home.
3694
3695
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003696What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003697===========================
3698
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003699*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3700
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003701Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003702--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003703
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003704- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3705 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003706
3707 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003708 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003709
3710 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3711 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003712 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003713 This needs to be documented.
3714
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003715- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3716 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3717
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003718- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3719 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3720 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3721
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003722- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3723 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3724
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003725- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3726 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3727 class forbids it).
3728
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003729- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3730 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3731 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3732
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003733- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3734
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003735Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003736-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003737
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003738- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3739 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003740 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003741
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003742- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3743 (like 1 + '').
3744
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003745Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003746-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003747
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003748- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3749 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3750 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3751 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003752 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003753 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3754
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003755- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3756 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3757 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3758 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3759
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003760- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3761 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003762 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3763 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3764 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003765
3766- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3767 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003768
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003769- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3770 bytes on its input.
3771
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003772Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003773-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003774
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003775- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003776 convenience function.
3777
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003778- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3779 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3780 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003781 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3782 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3783 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3784 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3785 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3786 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003787
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003788- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3789 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3790 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3791 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3792
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003793- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3794 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3795 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3796
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003797- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3798 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3799 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3800 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3801
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003802- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3803 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003804 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003805 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3806 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3807 new -l and -e options.
3808
3809- statcache is now deprecated.
3810
3811- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3812 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003813 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003814 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3815 time properly taken into account.
3816
3817- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3818 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3819 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3820 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3821
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003822Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003823-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003824
3825Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003826-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003827
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003828- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3829 is built with libdb3 if available.
3830
3831- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3832
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003833C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003834-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003835
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003836- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3837 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3838 PySequence_Size().
3839
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003840- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3841
3842- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3843 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3844 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3845
3846- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3847 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3848
3849- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3850 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3851
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003852New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003853-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003854
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003855- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3856 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3857
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003858- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3859 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3860
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003861- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3862
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003863Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003864-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003865
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003866- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3867 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3868
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003869Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003870-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003871
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003872Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003873----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003874
3875- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3876 removed completely in the next release.
3877
3878- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3879 OSX.
3880
3881- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3882 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3883
3884- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3885
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003886
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003887What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003888===========================
3889
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003890*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3891
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003892Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003893--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003894
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003895- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003896 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003897 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003898 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3899 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003900 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3901 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003902 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3903 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003904
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003905- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3906 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3907
3908- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3909 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3910
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003911Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003912-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003913
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003914- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3915 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3916 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3917 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3918 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3919 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3920 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3921 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3922
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003923- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3924 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3925 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3926 example).
3927
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003928- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003929 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003930 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003931 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003932
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003933- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3934 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3935 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003936 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003937
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003938- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3939 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3940 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3941 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3942 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3943 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3944
3945 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3946
3947 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3948
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003949Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003950-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003951
3952- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3953
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003954- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3955
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003956- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3957 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003958
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003959- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3960 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3961 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3962 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3963 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3964 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003965 attributes.
3966
3967- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3968 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3969 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003970
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003971- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3972 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3973 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003974
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003975- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3976 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3977 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003978 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3979 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3980
3981- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3982 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003983
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003984Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003985-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003986
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003987- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3988 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3989
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003990- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3991 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3992 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3993 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3994
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003995- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3996 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3997 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3998 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3999
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004000 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4001 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4002 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4003 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4004 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4005 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4006 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4007 without losing information).
4008
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004009- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004010 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4011 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4012 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4013 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4014 module).
4015
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004016 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004017 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4018 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4019 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4020 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004021
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004022- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004023 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4024 encoding.
4025
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004026- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4027 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4028
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004029- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004030 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4031
4032- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4033 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4034 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4035 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4036
4037- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4038
4039- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4040 ON, and OFF.
4041
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004042- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4043 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4044
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004045Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004046-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004047
4048- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4049 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4050 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004051
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004052- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4053 been added: -X and -E.
4054
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004055Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004056-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004057
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004058- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4059 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4060
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004061C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004062-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004063
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004064- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4065 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4066 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4067 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4068 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4069
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004070- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4071 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4072 as long) arguments.
4073
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004074- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4075 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4076 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4077 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4078 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4079 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4080
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004081- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4082 input.
4083
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004084New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004085-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004086
4087Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004088-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004089
4090Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004091-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004092
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004093- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4094 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4095 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4096
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004097- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4098 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4099 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004100 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004101
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004102 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4103 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4104 import signal
4105 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004106
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004107 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004108 while 1:
4109 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004110 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004111 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4112 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4113 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4114 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004115
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004116
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004117What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4118===========================
4119
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004120*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4121
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004122Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004123--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004124
4125- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4126 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4127 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4128
4129- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4130 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4131 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4132 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4133 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4134 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4135 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004136
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004137- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004138 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004139 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4140 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4141 associate a docstring with a property.
4142
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004143- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4144 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4145 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4146 other built-in object types.
4147
4148- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4149 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4150 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4151 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4152 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4153
4154- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4155 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4156
4157- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4158 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004159 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004160 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4161 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4162 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4163 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4164 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4165
4166- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4167 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4168 class.
4169
4170- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4171 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4172 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4173 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4174
4175- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4176 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4177 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4178 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4179
4180- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4181 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4182
4183- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4184 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4185 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4186 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4187 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004188 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004189 with the same value as s.
4190
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004191- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4192
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004193Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004194----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004195
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004196- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4197
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004198- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4199 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4200 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4201 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4202 objects.
4203
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004204- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4205 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004206 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4207 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4208
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004209- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4210 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4211 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4212
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004213Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004214-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004215
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004216- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4217 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4218 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4219 by the instances.
4220
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004221- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4222 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4223 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4224
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004225- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4226 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4227 before the entire comparison is complete.
4228
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004229- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4230 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4231 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4232
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004233- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4234 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4235 getwriter().
4236
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004237- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4238 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4239
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004240- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004241 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4242 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4243
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004244- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4245 iterable object.
4246
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004247- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4248 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004249
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004250- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4251 authentication.
4252
4253- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4254 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004255
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004256- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004257 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4258 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4259 a sample driver.)
4260
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004261Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004262-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004263
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004264- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4265 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4266 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4267 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4268 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4269 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4270 kernel has large file support.
4271
4272- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4273 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4274 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4275 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4276 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4277
4278- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4279 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4280 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4281
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004282C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004283-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004284
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004285- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4286 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4287
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004288New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004289-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004290
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004291- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4292 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4293
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004294Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004295-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004296
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004297- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4298 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4299 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4300 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4301 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4302
4303- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4304 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4305 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4306 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4307
4308- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4309 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4310
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004311Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004312-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004313
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004314- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004315 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4316 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004317
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004318
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004319What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4320===========================
4321
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004322*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4323
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004324Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004325----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004326
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004327- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4328 big to represent as a C double.
4329
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004330- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4331 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4332 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4333 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4334 restriction).
4335
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004336- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4337 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4338 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4339 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4340 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4341
4342 >>> dir([])
4343 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4344 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4345 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4346 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4347 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4348 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4349 'reverse', 'sort']
4350
4351 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4352
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004353- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004354 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4355 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4356 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4357 OverflowError exception.
4358
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004359- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004360 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004361 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4362 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4363 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4364 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4365 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004366 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004367 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4368 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4369
4370 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4371 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4372 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4373 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004374
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004375- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004376 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4377 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4378 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4379 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4380 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4381 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4382 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4383 once it is created.
4384
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004385- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4386 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4387 (key, value) pairs.
4388
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004389- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004390 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4391 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4392
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004393- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4394 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4395 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4396 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4397 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004398
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004399- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004400 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4401 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4402
4403 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4404
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004405- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004406 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4407
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004408Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004409-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004410
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004411- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004412 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4413 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004414
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004415- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4416 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4417 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4418 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4419 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4420 in this area anymore).
4421
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004422- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4423 threading.Timer.
4424
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004425- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4426 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4427
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004428- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004429 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4430
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004431- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004432 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4433 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4434 converted to Python longs.
4435
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004436- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004437 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4438
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004439- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4440 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4441 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4442
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004443Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004444-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004445
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004446- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4447 division operators as per PEP 238.
4448
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004449Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004450-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004451
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004452- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4453 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4454 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4455 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4456
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004457C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004458-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004459
4460- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004461
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004462- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4463 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004464 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004465
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004466 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4467 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004468 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004469 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004470
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004471- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004472 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4473 module:
4474
4475 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004476
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004477 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4478 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004479
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004480 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4481 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004482
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004483 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4484
4485 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4486
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004487- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004488 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4489 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4490 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004491
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004492New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004493-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004494
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004495- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4496 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4497 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4498 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4499 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004500
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004501Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004502-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004503
4504Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004505-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004506
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004507- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4508 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4509 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4510 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004511 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4512 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4513 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4514 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4515 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004516
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004517- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004518 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4519
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004520
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004521What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4522===========================
4523
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004524*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4525
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004526Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004527-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004528
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004529- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4530 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4531
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004532- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4533 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4534 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004535
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004536- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4537 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4538 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4539 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004540
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004541- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4542
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004543- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004544
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004545Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004546-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004547
4548- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004549 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004550 the module docstring for details.
4551
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004552Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004553-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004554
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004555- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004556 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4557 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4558 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004559
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004560- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4561 Nick Mathewson.
4562
4563Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004564----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004565
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004566- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4567 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4568 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4569 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4570 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4571 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4572 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4573 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4574
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004575- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4576 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4577 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4578 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4579
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004580- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4581 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4582 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4583 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4584 come a long way).
4585
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004586- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4587 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4588 write filters for these warnings).
4589
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004590- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4591 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4592 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4593 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4594 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4595
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004596- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4597 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4598 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4599 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4600 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4601 older distribution.
4602
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004603Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004604-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004605
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004606- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4607 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004608 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004609
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004610- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4611 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4612 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4613
4614- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4615
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004616- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4617
4618- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4619
4620- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4621
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004622- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004623
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004624- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4625
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004626New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004627-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004628
4629C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004630-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004631
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004632- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4633 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4634 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4635 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4636 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4637 against buffer overruns.
4638
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004639- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004640 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4641 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004642 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4643 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4644 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4645
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004646- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4647 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4648 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4649 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4650 deprecated.
4651
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004652Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004653-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004654
4655- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4656 relevant is found.
4657
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004658
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004659What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004660===========================
4661
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004662*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4663
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004664Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004665----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004666
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004667- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4668 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4669 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4670 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4671 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4672 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4673 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4674 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004675 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004676 repaired.
4677
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004678- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004679 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004680 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4681 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4682 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4683 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4684 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4685 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4686 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4687 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4688
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004689- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4690 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4691 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4692 leading BMO character).
4693
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004694- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4695 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4696 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4697
4698 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4699 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4700 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004701
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004702 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4703 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4704 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4705 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4706 for various simple to use conversions.
4707
4708 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4709 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4710
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004711 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4712 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4713 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4714 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4715 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4716 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4717 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4718 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4719 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4720 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4721 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4722 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4723 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4724 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4725 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004726
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004727- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4728 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4729 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004730 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004731 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004732
4733 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004734 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4735 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4736 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4737 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4738 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004739 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4740 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004741
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004742 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4743 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4744 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004745 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004746
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004747- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4748 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4749 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4750 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4751 floating arithmetic,
4752
4753 x = 9007199254740992.0
4754 print long(x)
4755
4756 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4757 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4758 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4759 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4760 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4761 functions are of good quality).
4762
4763 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4764 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4765 algorithms to break.
4766
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004767- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4768 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4769 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4770 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4771 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4772 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4773 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4774 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4775 order.
4776
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004777- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4778 operation along the most common code paths.
4779
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004780- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4781 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4782
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004783- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4784 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4785 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4786 {}.update(UserDict())
4787
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004788- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4789 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4790 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4791 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4792 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4793 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4794 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4795 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4796
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004797- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004798 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004799
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004800 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004801 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4802 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004803 join() method of strings
4804 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004805 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4806 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004807 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004808 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004809
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004810- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4811 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4812
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004813- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4814 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4815
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004816- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4817 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4818 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4819 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4820
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004821- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4822 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004823 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004824 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4825 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004826
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004827- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4828
4829
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004830Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004831-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004832
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004833- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004834 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004835 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4836 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4837
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004838- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4839 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4840
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004841- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4842 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4843 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4844 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4845
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004846- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4847 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4848 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4849
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004850- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4851
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004852- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4853
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004854- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4855 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4856 that are still imported into string.py).
4857
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004858- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4859
4860- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4861 Now it does.
4862
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004863- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4864
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004865- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4866 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4867 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4868 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4869 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004870 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4871 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004872
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004873- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4874 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4875 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4876 'help(object)'.
4877
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004878Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004879-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004880
4881- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004882 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004883 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4884 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4885
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004886- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004887 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4888 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004889
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004890C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004891-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004892
4893- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4894 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004895
4896----
4897
4898**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**