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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000011
12Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +000013-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000014
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +000015- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
16 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
17 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
18 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
19 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
20 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +000021 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +000022
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +000023- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
24 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
25 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
26 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
27 __init__: "def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass".
28
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +000029- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
30 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
31 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
32 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
33 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
34 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
35 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
36 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
37 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
38 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
39 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
40
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +000041- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
42 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
43 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
44 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
45 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
46 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
47
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +000048- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
49 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
50
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +000051- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
52 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
53 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
54 case.)
55
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +000056- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
57 passed as unicode strings.
58
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +000059- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
60 See SF bug #683467.
61
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +000062- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
63 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
64
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +000065- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
66
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +000067- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
68
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +000069- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
70 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
71 arguments.
72
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +000073- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
74 See SF bug #667147.
75
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +000076- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +000077 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +000078 See SF bug #676155.
79
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +000080- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +000081 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +000082 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
83 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
84 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
85 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
86 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
87 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +000088
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000089Extension modules
90-----------------
91
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +000092- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
93 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
94 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
95 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
96 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
97
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +000098- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
99
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000100- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000101 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000102 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
103 patch #678531.)
104
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000105- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
106 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
107
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000108- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
109 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
110
Martin v. Löwis9789aef2003-01-26 11:30:36 +0000111- A new module _iconv_codec has been added, to expose the iconv(3)
112 library.
113
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000114- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
115
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000116- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
117 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
118 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
119
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000120- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
121
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000122- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
123 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
124
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000125- datetime changes:
126
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000127 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
128 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
129 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
130 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
131 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
132 now.
133
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000134 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000135 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
136 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000137
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000138 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000139 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000140 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
141 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
142 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
143 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000144
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000145 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
146 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
147 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000148 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
149
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000150 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
151 by a later example coded by Guido.
152
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000153 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000154 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
155 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
156 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000157 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
158 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
159
160 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
161 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
162 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
163 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
164 tzinfo subclass instance.
165
166 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
167 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
168 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
169 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
170 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
171 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
172 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
173 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000174
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000175 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
176 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
177 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
178 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
179 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
180 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to
181 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
182 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
183 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
184 as a naive datetime object.
185
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000186 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
187 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
188 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
189
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000190 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
191 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
192 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
193 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
194 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
195 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
196 comparison.
197
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000198 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
199 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
200 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
201 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
202 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example,
203
204 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
205 and
206 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
207
208 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
209 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
210 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
211 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
212
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000213 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
214 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
215 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
216 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
217 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
218
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000219 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
220 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000221 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
222 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000223
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000224Library
225-------
226
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000227- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
228 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
229
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000230- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
231 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
232 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
233
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000234- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
235
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000236- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
237 exception.
238
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000239- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
240 class.
241
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000242- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
243 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
244 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
245
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000246- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
247 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
248
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000249- realpath is now exported when doing from poxixpath import *.
250 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
251 See SF bug #659228.
252
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000253- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
254 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
255 See SF patch #651082.
256
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000257- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000258
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000259- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
260 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
261
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000262- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000263 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000264
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000265Tools/Demos
266-----------
267
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000268- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
269 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
270 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
271 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
272 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
273 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
274 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
275 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
276 example:
277
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000278 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
279 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000280
281 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
282
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000283
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000284Build
285-----
286
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000287- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
288 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
289 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
290 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like
291 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
292
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000293- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
294 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
295 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
296 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
297 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
298 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
299 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
300 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
301 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
302
303- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
304 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
305 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
306 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
307
308- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
309 from the Tools/scripts directory.
310
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000311C API
312-----
313
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000314- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
315 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
316 (SF #681367)
317
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000318- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
319 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
320 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
321 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000322
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000323
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000324New platforms
325-------------
326
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000327TBD
328
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000329Tests
330-----
331
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000332TBD
333
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000334Windows
335-------
336
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000337- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
338 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
339
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000340- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
341 release without strong cryptography.
342
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000343- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
344 absolute pathname.
345
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000346- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
347 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
348
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000349Mac
350---
351
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000352- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
353 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000354
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000355- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
356 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
357 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000358
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000359- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
360 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000361
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000362
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000363What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000364=================================
365
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000366*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000367
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000368Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000369--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000370
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000371- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
372
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000373- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
374 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000375 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000376 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000377 a different meaning than before.
378
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000379- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000380 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000381 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000382
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000383- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000384 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000385 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000386
387- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
388 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
389 and deallocation.
390
391- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
392 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
393
394- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
395 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
396 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
397 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
398 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
399
400- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
401 now detected by the garbage collector.
402
403- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
404 [SF bug 519621]
405
406- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
407 identifier.
408
409- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
410 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
411 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
412 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
413 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
414 [SF bug 563060]
415
416- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
417 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
418 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
419 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
420 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
421
422- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
423 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
424 not called. [SF bug #537450]
425
426- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
427
428- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
429 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
430 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
431 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
432 state of the slots would be lost.)
433
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000434Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000435-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000436
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000437- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000438 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
439 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
440 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
441 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000442 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
443 Jython 2.1.
444
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000445- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was inititally developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000446 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000447 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
448 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
449 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
450 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
451 these, see PEP 302.
452
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000453- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
454 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
455 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
456
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000457- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
458 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
459 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
460
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000461- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
462 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
463 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
464
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000465- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
466 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
467 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
468 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
469 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
470 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
471 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
472 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
473 releases or implementations.
474
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000475- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000476 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
477 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000478
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000479- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
480 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
481
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000482- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
483 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
484 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
485
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000486- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
487 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
488
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000489- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
490 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000491 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
492 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000493
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000494- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
495 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
496 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
497 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
498 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
499
500 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
501 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
502 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
503 pattern.
504
505 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
506 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
507 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
508 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
509
510 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
511 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
512 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
513 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
514 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
515 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
516
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000517- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
518 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
519 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
520 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
521 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
522 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
523 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
524 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000525
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000526- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
527 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
528 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
529 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
530 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000531 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
532 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
533 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
534 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
535 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
536 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
537 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000538
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000539- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
540 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
541
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000542- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
543 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
544 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
545 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
546 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
547 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
548 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
549 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
550 to Zack Weinberg!
551
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000552- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
553 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
554 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
555 type. This has been fixed now.
556
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000557- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
558 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
559 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
560
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000561- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
562 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
563 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
564 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
565 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
566 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
567 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
568 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000569 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000570
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000571- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
572 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
573 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000574
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000575- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
576 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
577 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
578 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
579 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
580 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
581 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
582 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000583 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000584 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
585 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
586
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000587- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
588 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
589 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
590 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
591 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
592 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
593 this.)
594
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000595- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
596 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000597 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000598 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000599 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
600 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000601 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
602 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000603
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000604- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
605 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
606 currently running.
607
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000608- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
609 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
610 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
611 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
612
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000613- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
614 as directory names.
615
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000616- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
617 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
618
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000619- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
620 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
621
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000622- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000623 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
624 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000625
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000626- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
627 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
628 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
629 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
630 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
631
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000632- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
633 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
634 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
635 removed.
636
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000637- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
638 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
639 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
640
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000641- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
642 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
643 to __debug__.
644
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000645- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
646 string to the left with zeros. For example,
647 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
648
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000649- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
650 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
651 deprecated now.
652
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000653- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
654 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
655 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000656
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000657- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
658 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
659 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
660 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
661 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000662
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000663- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
664 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
665
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000666- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
667 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
668 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000669 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000670 is backward compatible.
671
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000672- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
673 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
674 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
675 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
676 could access a pointer to freed memory.
677
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000678- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
679 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
680 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
681 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
682 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
683 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000684
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000685- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
686 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
687
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000688- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
689 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
690
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000691- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
692 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
693 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
694 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
695 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
696
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000697- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
698 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
699 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
700
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000701- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000702 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
703
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000704- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
705 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
706 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000707
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000708- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
709 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
710
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000711- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
712 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
713 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
714
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +0000715- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
716
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000717Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000718-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000719
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +0000720- Added three operators to the operator module:
721 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
722 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
723 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
724
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000725- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
726
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000727- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
728 archives.
729
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000730- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
731 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
732 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
733
734 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
735
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000736- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
737 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
738 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000739 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000740
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000741- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
742 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
743 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
744 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000745 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
746 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
747 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
748 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000749
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000750- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
751 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000752
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000753- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
754
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000755- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
756 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
757
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000758- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
759 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
760 supported.
761
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000762- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
763
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000764- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
765 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000766
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000767- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
768 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
769
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000770- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
771
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000772- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
773 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
774
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000775- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
776 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
777 functions but callable type objects.
778
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000779- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000780 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000781 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000782
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +0000783- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
784 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000785
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000786- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
787 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000788
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000789- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
790 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
791 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
792 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
793
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000794- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
795 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000796
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000797- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
798 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
799 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
800 and __imul__.
801
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000802- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000803 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
804 is called.
805
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000806- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
807 been added where available.
808
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000809- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
810 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
811 interpreter was compiled.
812
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000813- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
814 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
815 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000816 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000817 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
818 1, not 2.
819
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000820- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
821 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
822 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
823 limit.
824
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000825- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
826 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
827 bug #623464.
828
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +0000829- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
830 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
831 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
832 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
833
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000834Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000835-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000836
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +0000837- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
838
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +0000839- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
840 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
841 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
842 with Python 2.3a2.
843
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +0000844- os.path exposes getctime.
845
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +0000846- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
847 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparision
848 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
849 the result to zero. Approximate comparision is essential for
850 unit tests of floating point results.
851
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +0000852- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
853 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
854 has been increased.
855
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000856- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
857 executed.
858
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +0000859- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
860 postinstallation script.
861
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +0000862- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
863 test the current module.
864
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +0000865- When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
866 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
867 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
868 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
869 this behavior needs to be controlled.
870
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000871- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000872 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000873 Ward's Optik package.
874
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000875- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
876 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
877 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
878 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
879
880- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
881 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000882 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000883
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +0000884- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
885 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
886 shelf are binary pickles.
887
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +0000888- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
889 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
890
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +0000891- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
892 modules are iterators now.
893
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +0000894- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
895 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
896 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
897 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
898 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
899 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000900
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +0000901- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
902 with their entity value.
903
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +0000904- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
905
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000906- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
907 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +0000908
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000909- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
910 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000911 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +0000912
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +0000913- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
914 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
915 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
916 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
917 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
918 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
919 main():
920
921 import locale
922 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
923
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +0000924- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
925 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
926
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +0000927- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
928 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
929 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
930 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
931 to the new standard.
932
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +0000933- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
934 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
935 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
936 an extension to the database.
937
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000938- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
939 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
940 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
941 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +0000942 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000943
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000944- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000945 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000946
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000947- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
948 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
949 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
950 bounded integers.
951
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +0000952- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
953 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
954 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
955 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
956 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
957 in existence.
958
959 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
960 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
961 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
962 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
963 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
964 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
965
966 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
967 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
968 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
969 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
970
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +0000971- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
972 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
973 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
974
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +0000975- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
976
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000977- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
978 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
979 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
980 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
981
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +0000982- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
983 argument.
984
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +0000985- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
986 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
987 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
988 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
989 [SF patch 560794].
990
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000991- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
992 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
993 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000994 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
995 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
996 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000997
998- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
999 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001000
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001001- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1002 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1003 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1004 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001005
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001006- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1007 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1008 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1009 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1010 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1011
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001012- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001013
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001014- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1015
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001016- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1017 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1018 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1019 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1020 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1021 identical to None.
1022
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001023- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1024 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1025 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1026 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1027 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1028 results now.
1029
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001030- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1031 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1032
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001033- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1034 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1035 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1036 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1037 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1038 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1039 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1040 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1041
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001042- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1043
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001044- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1045 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1046
1047- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1048 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1049 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1050 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1051 and other systems.
1052
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001053- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1054 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1055 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1056 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 +00001057 work well with these.
1058
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001059- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1060
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001061- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001062 connections.
1063
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001064- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1065 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1066 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1067
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001068- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1069 sets
1070
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001071- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1072 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1073 name.
1074
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001075- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1076 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1077 passed in.
1078
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001079- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001080 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001081 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1082 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001083
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001084- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1085
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001086- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1087
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001088- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1089 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1090 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1091
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001092- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1093 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1094 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1095 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001096 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001097
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001098- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001099 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001100 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001101
1102- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1103 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1104 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1105
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001106- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001107 the value of its expression argument.
1108
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001109- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1110 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1111 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1112
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001113- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1114 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1115 skipstone browser was included.
1116
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001117- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1118 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1119
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001120Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001121-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001122
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001123- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1124 names in addition to accepting file names.
1125
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001126- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1127 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1128 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1129 still used and useful.)
1130
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001131- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1132 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1133 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1134 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001135
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001136- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1137 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1138 the generated binary.
1139
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001140Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001141-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001142
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001143- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1144
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001145- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1146 except in the hands of experts.
1147
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001148- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001149 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1150 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1151 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001152
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001153- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1154 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1155 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1156 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1157 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1158 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1159 builds.
1160
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001161- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1162 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1163 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1164 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1165 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1166 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1167 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1168 new type.
1169
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001170- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001171
1172 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1173 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1174 positive infinities.
1175
1176 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1177 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1178 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1179 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1180 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1181 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1182 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1183
1184 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1185
1186 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1187
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001188- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1189 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1190 size of the executable.
1191
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001192- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1193 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1194 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1195 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001196
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001197- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1198
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001199- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1200 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1201 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001202
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001203- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1204 well as Unix.
1205
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001206- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1207 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1208 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1209 modules in the README file for details.
1210
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001211C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001212-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001213
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001214- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1215 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001216 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001217 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001218 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001219
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001220- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1221 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1222 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1223 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1224 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1225 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
1226 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
1227 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1228 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1229 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1230 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1231 aligned.)
1232
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001233- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1234 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1235 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1236
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001237- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1238 level.
1239
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001240- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1241 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1242 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1243 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1244 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1245
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001246- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1247 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1248 code.
1249
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001250- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1251 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1252 adjusting for negative indices.
1253
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001254- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1255 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1256 object.
1257
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001258- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1259 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1260 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1261
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001262- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1263 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001264
1265- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1266
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001267- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1268 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1269 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1270 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1271
1272- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1273
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001274- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001275
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001276- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001277 without going through the buffer API.
1278
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001279- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001280
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001281- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1282 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1283 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1284 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1285
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001286- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1287 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1288
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001289- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001290 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1291
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001292New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001293-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001294
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001295- OpenVMS is now supported.
1296
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001297- AtheOS is now supported.
1298
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001299- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1300
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001301- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1302
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001303Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001304-----
1305
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001306- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1307 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1308 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001309
1310Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001311-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001312
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001313- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1314 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1315 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1316 bugs.
1317 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001318 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of
1319 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1320 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001321 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001322
1323- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001324 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001325
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001326- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1327 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1328
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001329- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1330 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
1331 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
1332 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1333
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001334- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1335 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1336 use files" uninstall option).
1337
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001338- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1339
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001340- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1341 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1342
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001343- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1344 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1345 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1346
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001347- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1348 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1349 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1350 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1351 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001352 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1353 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1354 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001355
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001356- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001357 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001358 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1359 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1360 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1361 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1362 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1363 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1364 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1365 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1366 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1367 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1368 work around.
1369
1370- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1371 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1372 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1373 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1374 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1375 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1376 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1377 specified with O_CREAT too).
1378
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001379Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001380----
1381
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001382- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001383
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001384- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1385 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1386 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1387
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001388- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1389 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1390 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1391
1392- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1393 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1394 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1395 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1396 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1397 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1398 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1399 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001400
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001401- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1402 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1403 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001404
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001405- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1406 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1407 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1408 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1409 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001410
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001411- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1412 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1413 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001414
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001415- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1416 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001417
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001418- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1419 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1420 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1421 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1422 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001423
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001424- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1425 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1426 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1427
1428- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1429 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1430 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001431
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001432- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1433 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1434 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1435 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
1436 Help Viewer comaptible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001437
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001438- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1439 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001440
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001441- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1442 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001443
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001444- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
1445 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was but "ascii", like on
1446 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1447 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001448
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001449What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001450===============================
1451
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001452*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1453
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001454Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001455--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001456
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001457- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1458 with a custom metaclass.
1459
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001460Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001461-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001462
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001463- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1464 are proxies.
1465
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001466Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001467-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001468
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001469- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1470 very short strings.
1471
1472- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1473 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1474 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1475 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1476 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1477
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001478Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001479-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001480
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001481- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1482 close or delete time).
1483
1484- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1485 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1486
1487- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1488
1489- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001490 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001491
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001492Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001493-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001494
1495Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001496-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001497
1498C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001499-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001500
1501New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001502-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001503
1504Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001505-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001506
1507Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001508-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001509
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001510- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1511
1512- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1513 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1514
1515- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1516 deleted at process exit time.
1517
1518- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1519 in backslash.
1520
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001521Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001522----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001523
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001524- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1525 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1526 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1527
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001528
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001529What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001530===========================
1531
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001532*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1533
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001534Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001535--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001536
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001537- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1538 been extensively updated. See
1539
1540 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1541
1542 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1543
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001544- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1545 deleted!
1546
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001547- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1548 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1549 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1550 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1551 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1552
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001553- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1554
1555 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1556 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1557
1558 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1559 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1560 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1561 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1562 supported anyway.
1563
1564 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1565 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1566
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001567- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1568 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1569 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1570 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1571 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001572
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001573- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1574 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1575 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1576
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001577Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001578-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001579
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001580- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1581 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1582 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1583 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1584 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1585 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001586 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1587 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1588 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1589 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001590
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001591- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1592 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1593 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1594
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001595Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001596-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001597
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001598- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1599
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001600Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001601-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001602
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001603- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1604 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1605 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1606 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1607 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1608 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1609
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001610- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1611
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001612- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1613
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001614- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1615
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001616- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1617 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1618 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1619
1620- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1621
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001622Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001623-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001624
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001625- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1626 off a search on Google.
1627
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001628Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001629-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001630
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001631- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1632 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1633 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1634 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1635 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1636 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1637 other platforms should do likewise.
1638
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001639- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1640 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1641 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1642
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001643C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001644-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001645
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001646- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1647 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1648 producing key-value pairs.
1649
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001650- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001651 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001652 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1653 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1654 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1655 previously went unchallenged.
1656
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001657New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001658-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001659
1660Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001661-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001662
1663Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001664-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001665
1666Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001667----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001668
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001669- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1670 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001671
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001672- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1673 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1674 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1675 home.
1676
1677
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001678What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001679===========================
1680
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001681*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1682
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001683Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001684--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001685
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001686- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1687 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001688
1689 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001690 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001691
1692 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1693 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001694 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001695 This needs to be documented.
1696
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001697- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1698 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1699
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001700- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1701 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1702 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1703
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001704- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1705 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1706
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001707- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1708 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1709 class forbids it).
1710
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001711- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1712 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1713 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1714
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001715- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1716
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001717Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001718-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001719
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001720- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1721 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001722 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001723
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001724- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1725 (like 1 + '').
1726
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001727Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001728-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001729
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001730- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1731 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1732 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1733 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001734 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001735 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1736
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001737- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1738 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1739 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1740 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1741
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001742- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1743 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001744 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1745 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1746 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001747
1748- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1749 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001750
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001751- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1752 bytes on its input.
1753
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001754Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001755-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001756
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001757- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001758 convenience function.
1759
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001760- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1761 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1762 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001763 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1764 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1765 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1766 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1767 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1768 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001769
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001770- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1771 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1772 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1773 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1774
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001775- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1776 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1777 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1778
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001779- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1780 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1781 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1782 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1783
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001784- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1785 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001786 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001787 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1788 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1789 new -l and -e options.
1790
1791- statcache is now deprecated.
1792
1793- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1794 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001795 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001796 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1797 time properly taken into account.
1798
1799- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1800 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1801 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1802 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1803
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001804Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001805-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001806
1807Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001808-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001809
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001810- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1811 is built with libdb3 if available.
1812
1813- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1814
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001815C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001816-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001817
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001818- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1819 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1820 PySequence_Size().
1821
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001822- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1823
1824- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1825 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1826 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1827
1828- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1829 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1830
1831- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1832 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1833
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001834New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001835-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001836
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001837- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1838 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1839
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001840- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1841 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1842
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001843- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1844
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001845Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001846-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001847
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001848- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1849 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1850
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001851Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001852-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001853
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001854Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001855----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001856
1857- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1858 removed completely in the next release.
1859
1860- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1861 OSX.
1862
1863- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1864 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1865
1866- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1867
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001868
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001869What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001870===========================
1871
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001872*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
1873
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001874Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001875--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001876
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001877- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001878 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001879 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001880 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
1881 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001882 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
1883 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001884 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
1885 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00001886
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00001887- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
1888 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
1889
1890- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
1891 class methods, static methods, and properties.
1892
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001893Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001894-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001895
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00001896- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
1897 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
1898 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
1899 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
1900 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
1901 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
1902 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
1903 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
1904
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001905- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
1906 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
1907 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
1908 example).
1909
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001910- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001911 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001912 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001913 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001914
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001915- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
1916 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
1917 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00001918 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001919
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001920- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
1921 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
1922 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
1923 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
1924 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
1925 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
1926
1927 isinstance(x, (A, B))
1928
1929 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
1930
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001931Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001932-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001933
1934- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
1935
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001936- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
1937
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001938- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
1939 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00001940
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001941- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
1942 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
1943 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
1944 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
1945 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
1946 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00001947 attributes.
1948
1949- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
1950 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
1951 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00001952
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001953- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
1954 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
1955 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001956
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001957- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
1958 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
1959 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001960 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
1961 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
1962
1963- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
1964 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001965
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001966Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001967-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001968
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00001969- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
1970 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
1971
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001972- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
1973 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
1974 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
1975 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
1976
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00001977- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
1978 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
1979 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
1980 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
1981
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00001982 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
1983 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
1984 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
1985 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
1986 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
1987 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
1988 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
1989 without losing information).
1990
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001991- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00001992 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
1993 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
1994 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
1995 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
1996 module).
1997
1998 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
1999 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2000 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2001 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2002 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002003
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002004- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002005 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2006 encoding.
2007
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002008- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2009 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2010
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002011- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002012 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2013
2014- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2015 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2016 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2017 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2018
2019- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2020
2021- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2022 ON, and OFF.
2023
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002024- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2025 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2026
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002027Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002028-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002029
2030- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2031 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2032 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002033
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002034- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2035 been added: -X and -E.
2036
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002037Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002038-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002039
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002040- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2041 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2042
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002043C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002044-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002045
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002046- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2047 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2048 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2049 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2050 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2051
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002052- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2053 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2054 as long) arguments.
2055
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002056- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2057 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2058 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2059 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2060 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2061 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2062
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002063- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2064 input.
2065
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002066New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002067-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002068
2069Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002070-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002071
2072Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002073-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002074
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002075- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2076 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2077 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2078
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002079- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2080 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2081 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002082 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002083
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002084 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2085 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2086 import signal
2087 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002088
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002089 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002090 while 1:
2091 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002092 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002093 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2094 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2095 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2096 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002097
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002098
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002099What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2100===========================
2101
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002102*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2103
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002104Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002105--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002106
2107- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2108 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2109 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2110
2111- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2112 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2113 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2114 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2115 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2116 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2117 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002118
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002119- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002120 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002121 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2122 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2123 associate a docstring with a property.
2124
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002125- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2126 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2127 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2128 other built-in object types.
2129
2130- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2131 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2132 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2133 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2134 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2135
2136- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2137 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2138
2139- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2140 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002141 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002142 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2143 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2144 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2145 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2146 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2147
2148- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2149 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2150 class.
2151
2152- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2153 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2154 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2155 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2156
2157- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2158 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2159 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2160 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2161
2162- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2163 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2164
2165- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2166 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2167 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2168 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2169 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002170 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002171 with the same value as s.
2172
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002173- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2174
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002175Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002176----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002177
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002178- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2179
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002180- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2181 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2182 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2183 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2184 objects.
2185
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002186- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2187 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002188 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2189 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2190
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002191- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2192 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2193 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2194
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002195Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002196-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002197
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002198- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2199 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2200 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2201 by the instances.
2202
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002203- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2204 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2205 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2206
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002207- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2208 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2209 before the entire comparison is complete.
2210
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002211- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2212 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2213 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2214
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002215- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2216 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2217 getwriter().
2218
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002219- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2220 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2221
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002222- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002223 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2224 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2225
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002226- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2227 iterable object.
2228
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002229- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2230 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002231
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002232- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2233 authentication.
2234
2235- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2236 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002237
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002238- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002239 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2240 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2241 a sample driver.)
2242
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002243Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002244-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002245
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002246- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2247 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2248 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2249 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2250 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2251 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2252 kernel has large file support.
2253
2254- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2255 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2256 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2257 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2258 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2259
2260- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2261 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2262 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2263
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002264C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002265-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002266
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002267- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2268 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2269
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002270New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002271-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002272
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002273- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2274 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2275
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002276Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002277-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002278
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002279- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2280 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2281 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2282 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2283 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2284
2285- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2286 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2287 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2288 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2289
2290- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2291 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2292
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002293Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002294-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002295
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002296- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002297 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2298 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002299
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002300
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002301What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2302===========================
2303
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002304*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2305
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002306Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002307----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002308
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002309- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2310 big to represent as a C double.
2311
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002312- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2313 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2314 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2315 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2316 restriction).
2317
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002318- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2319 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2320 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2321 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2322 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2323
2324 >>> dir([])
2325 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2326 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2327 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2328 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2329 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2330 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2331 'reverse', 'sort']
2332
2333 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2334
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002335- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002336 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2337 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2338 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2339 OverflowError exception.
2340
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002341- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002342 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002343 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2344 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2345 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2346 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2347 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002348 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002349 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2350 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2351
2352 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2353 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2354 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2355 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002356
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002357- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002358 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2359 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2360 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2361 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2362 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2363 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2364 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2365 once it is created.
2366
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002367- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2368 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2369 (key, value) pairs.
2370
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002371- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002372 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2373 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2374
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002375- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2376 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2377 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2378 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2379 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002380
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002381- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002382 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2383 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2384
2385 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2386
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002387- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002388 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2389
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002390Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002391-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002392
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002393- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002394 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2395 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002396
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002397- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2398 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2399 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2400 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2401 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2402 in this area anymore).
2403
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002404- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2405 threading.Timer.
2406
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002407- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2408 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2409
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002410- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002411 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2412
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002413- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002414 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2415 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2416 converted to Python longs.
2417
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002418- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002419 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2420
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002421- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2422 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2423 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2424
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002425Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002426-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002427
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002428- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2429 division operators as per PEP 238.
2430
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002431Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002432-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002433
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002434- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2435 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2436 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2437 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2438
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002439C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002440-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002441
2442- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002443
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002444- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2445 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002446 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002447
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002448 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2449 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002450 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002451 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002452
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002453- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002454 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2455 module:
2456
2457 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002458
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002459 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2460 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002461
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002462 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2463 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002464
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002465 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2466
2467 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2468
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002469- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002470 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2471 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2472 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002473
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002474New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002475-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002476
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002477- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2478 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2479 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2480 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2481 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002482
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002483Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002484-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002485
2486Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002487-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002488
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002489- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2490 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2491 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2492 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002493 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2494 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2495 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2496 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2497 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002498
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002499- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002500 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2501
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002502
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002503What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2504===========================
2505
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002506*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2507
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002508Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002509-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002510
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002511- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2512 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2513
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002514- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2515 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2516 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002517
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002518- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2519 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2520 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2521 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002522
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002523- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2524
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002525- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002526
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002527Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002528-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002529
2530- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002531 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002532 the module docstring for details.
2533
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002534Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002535-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002536
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002537- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002538 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2539 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2540 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002541
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002542- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2543 Nick Mathewson.
2544
2545Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002546----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002547
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002548- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2549 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2550 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2551 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2552 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2553 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2554 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2555 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2556
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002557- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2558 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2559 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2560 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2561
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002562- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2563 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2564 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2565 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2566 come a long way).
2567
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002568- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2569 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2570 write filters for these warnings).
2571
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002572- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2573 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2574 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2575 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2576 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2577
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002578- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2579 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2580 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2581 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2582 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2583 older distribution.
2584
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002585Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002586-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002587
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002588- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2589 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002590 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002591
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002592- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2593 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2594 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2595
2596- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2597
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002598- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2599
2600- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2601
2602- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2603
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002604- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002605
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002606- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2607
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002608New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002609-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002610
2611C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002612-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002613
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002614- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2615 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2616 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2617 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2618 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2619 against buffer overruns.
2620
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002621- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002622 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2623 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002624 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2625 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2626 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2627
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002628- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2629 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2630 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2631 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2632 deprecated.
2633
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002634Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002635-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002636
2637- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2638 relevant is found.
2639
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002640
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002641What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002642===========================
2643
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002644*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2645
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002646Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002647----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002648
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002649- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2650 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2651 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2652 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2653 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2654 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2655 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2656 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002657 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002658 repaired.
2659
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002660- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002661 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002662 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2663 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2664 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2665 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2666 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2667 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2668 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2669 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2670
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002671- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2672 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2673 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2674 leading BMO character).
2675
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002676- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2677 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2678 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2679
2680 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2681 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2682 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002683
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002684 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2685 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2686 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2687 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2688 for various simple to use conversions.
2689
2690 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2691 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2692
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002693 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2694 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2695 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2696 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2697 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2698 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2699 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2700 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2701 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2702 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2703 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2704 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2705 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2706 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2707 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002708
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002709- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2710 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2711 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002712 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002713 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002714
2715 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002716 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2717 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2718 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2719 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2720 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002721 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2722 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002723
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002724 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2725 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2726 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002727 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002728
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002729- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2730 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2731 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2732 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2733 floating arithmetic,
2734
2735 x = 9007199254740992.0
2736 print long(x)
2737
2738 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2739 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2740 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2741 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2742 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2743 functions are of good quality).
2744
2745 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2746 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2747 algorithms to break.
2748
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002749- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2750 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2751 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2752 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2753 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2754 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2755 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2756 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2757 order.
2758
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002759- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2760 operation along the most common code paths.
2761
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002762- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2763 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2764
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002765- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2766 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2767 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2768 {}.update(UserDict())
2769
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002770- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2771 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2772 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2773 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2774 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2775 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2776 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2777 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2778
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002779- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002780 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002781
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002782 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002783 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2784 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002785 join() method of strings
2786 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002787 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2788 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002789 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002790 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002791
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002792- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2793 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2794
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002795- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2796 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2797
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002798- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2799 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2800 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2801 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2802
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002803- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2804 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002805 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002806 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2807 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002808
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002809- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2810
2811
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002812Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002813-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002814
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002815- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002816 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002817 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2818 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2819
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002820- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2821 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2822
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002823- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2824 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2825 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2826 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2827
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002828- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2829 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2830 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2831
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002832- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2833
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002834- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2835
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002836- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2837 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2838 that are still imported into string.py).
2839
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002840- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2841
2842- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2843 Now it does.
2844
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002845- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2846
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002847- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2848 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2849 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2850 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2851 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002852 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2853 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002854
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002855- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2856 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2857 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2858 'help(object)'.
2859
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002860Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002861-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002862
2863- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002864 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002865 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
2866 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
2867
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002868- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002869 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
2870 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002871
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002872C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002873-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002874
2875- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
2876 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002877
2878----
2879
2880**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**