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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
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XXXX-XX-XX*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +000015- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
16 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
17
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +000018- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
19 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
20 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
21 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
22
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +000023- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
24 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
25
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +000026- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
27 constant.
28
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +000029- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
30 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
31 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
32 large), and to anomalies such as
33 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
34 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
35 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
36 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000037
38Extension modules
39-----------------
40
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +000041- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
42 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +000043 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
44 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
45 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000046
47Library
48-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +000049
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +000050- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
51 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
52 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
53 --swig-cpp.
54
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +000055- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
56 it is set.
57
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +000058- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +000059
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +000060- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
61 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
62 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
63 Closes bug #1039270.
64
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +000065- Updates for the email package:
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +000066 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +000067 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
68 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
69 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
70 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
71 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
72 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
73 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
74 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
75 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
76 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
77 + Updates to documentation.
78
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +000079- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
80 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
81 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
82 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
83
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +000084- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000085
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +000086- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
87 applications should use the getmember function.
88
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +000089- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
90
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +000091- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
92 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
93 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
94 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
95 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
96 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
97 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
98 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
99 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
100
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000101- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
102 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000103 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000104
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000105- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
106 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
107 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
108 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
109 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
110 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
111 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
112 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000113
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000114- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
115 the new public features (of which there are many).
116
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000117- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000118 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
119 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
120 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
121 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000122 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000123
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000124- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
125
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000126- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
127 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
128 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
129 options.
130
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000131- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
132 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
133 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
134 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
135 conditions under which non-string values work.
136
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000137Build
138-----
139
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000140- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
141 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
142 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
143
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000144- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
145 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
146 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
147 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
148 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000149
150C API
151-----
152
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000153- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
154 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
155
156- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
157
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000158- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
159 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
160 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
161 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
162 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
163 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
164 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
165 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
166 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
167
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000168- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
169
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000170- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
171 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
172 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000173
174Documentation
175-------------
176
177...
178
179Tests
180-----
181
182- test__locale ported to unittest
183
184Windows
185-------
186
187...
188
189Mac
190---
191
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000192- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
193 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
194 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000195
196New platforms
197-------------
198
199...
200
201Tools/Demos
202-----------
203
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000204- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
205 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
206 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
207 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
208 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000209
210
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000211What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
212=================================
213
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000214*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000215
216Core and builtins
217-----------------
218
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000219- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000220 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
221
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000222- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
223 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
224 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
225 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
226 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
227 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
228 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
229 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000230 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
231 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
232 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
233 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
234 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000235
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000236- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
237 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
238 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
239 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
240 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
241
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000242- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
243
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000244- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
245 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
246
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000247- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
248 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
249 modified the list.
250
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000251- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
252 functions is now writable.
253
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000254- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
255 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
256 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
257 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
258
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000259- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
260 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
261 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
262 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
263 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000264
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000265- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
266 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
267
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000268Extension modules
269-----------------
270
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000271- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
272
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000273- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
274 data.
275
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000276- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
277 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
278 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
279 supposed to have been truncated away.
280
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000281- Added socket.socketpair().
282
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000283- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
284 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
285
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000286- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000287 versions of Python, have now been removed.
288
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000289Library
290-------
291
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000292- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000293 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000294
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000295- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
296 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
297
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000298- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
299 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
300
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000301- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
302
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000303- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
304 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000305
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000306- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
307 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
308
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000309- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
310
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000311- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
312
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000313- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
314
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000315- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
316 Percivall.
317
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000318- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
319 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
320
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000321- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
322 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
323 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000324 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000325
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000326- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
327 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
328 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
329 and exponent.
330
331- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
332
333- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
334 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
335 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
336
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000337- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
338 to the readline module.
339
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000340- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000341 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
342 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000343
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000344- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
345 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
346 contains symlinks.
347
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000348- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
349 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
350
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000351- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
352 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
353 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
354
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000355- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
356 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
357 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
358 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
359 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
360 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
361 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
362 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
363 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
364 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
365 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
366 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
367 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
368
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000369- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
370
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000371Tools/Demos
372-----------
373
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000374- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
375 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
376
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000377- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
378
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000379Build
380-----
381
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000382- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
383 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
384 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
385 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
386 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
387 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
388 plans to do so.
389
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000390- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
391 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
392
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000393- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
394 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
395
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000396- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
397 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
398
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000399- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
400 GNU/k*BSD systems.
401
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000402- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
403 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
404
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000405C API
406-----
407
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000408..
409
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000410Documentation
411-------------
412
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000413- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
414 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
415
416- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
417 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
418 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000419
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000420New platforms
421-------------
422
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000423- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
424
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000425Tests
426-----
427
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000428..
429
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000430Windows
431-------
432
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000433- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
434 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
435 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
436 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
437 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
438 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
439 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
440 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
441 the problem.
442
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000443Mac
444---
445
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000446..
447
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000448
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000449What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
450=================================
451
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000452*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000453
454Core and builtins
455-----------------
456
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000457- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
458 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
459 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
460 sensitive code.
461
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000462- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000463 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000464
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000465 @staticmethod
466 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000467
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000468 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000469
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000470- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
471 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
472 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
473 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
474 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
475 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
476 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
477 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
478 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
479 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
480 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
481
482 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
483 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
484 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
485 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
486 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
487 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
488 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
489
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000490- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
491 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
492
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000493- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000494 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000495
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000496- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000497 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000498 which was missing for no apparent reason.
499
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000500- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000501 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
502 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
503
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000504- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
505 types that support garbage collection.
506
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000507- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
508
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000509- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
510 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
511 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
512 Jython.
513
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000514- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
515
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000516- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
517 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
518
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000519- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
520 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
521 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000522
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000523- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
524 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
525 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
526
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000527Extension modules
528-----------------
529
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000530- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
531
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000532Library
533-------
534
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000535- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
536 TIS-620
537
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000538- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
539 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
540 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
541 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
542 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
543 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
544 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
545 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
546 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
547 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
548
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000549- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
550
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000551- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
552 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
553 same as when the argument is omitted).
554 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
555
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000556- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
557
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000558- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
559 schemes are offered.
560
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000561- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
562
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000563- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
564 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
565 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
566
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000567- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
568
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000569- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
570 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
571
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000572- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
573 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
574 when dummy_threading is being used.
575
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000576- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
577 from a tarfile.
578
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000579- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000580 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000581
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000582- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
583 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
584 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
585 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
586
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000587- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
588 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
589
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000590- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
591 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
592 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
593 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
594 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
595 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
596 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
597 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
598 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
599 by some other method in progress).
600
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000601- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
602 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
603 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000604
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000605- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
606
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000607- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
608 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
609 AM Kuchling.
610
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000611- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
612 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
613 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
614
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000615- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
616 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
617 instead of unsigned.
618
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000619- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000620 no longer part of the public API.
621
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000622- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
623 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
624 string methods of the same name).
625
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000626- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000627 SF patch 945642.
628
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000629- doctest unittest integration improvements:
630
631 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
632
633 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
634 DocTestSuites.
635
636- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
637 that provide thread-local data.
638
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000639- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
640 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
641
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000642- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
643
644- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
645 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
646 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
647
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000648- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
649
650 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
651 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
652 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000653
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000654 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
655 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
656 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
657 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
658
659 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
660 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
661
662 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
663 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
664 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
665 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
666
667 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
668 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
669 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
670 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
671 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
672
673 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
674 wrapping help output.
675
676 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
677 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
678 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000679
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000680C API
681-----
682
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000683- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
684 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
685 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
686 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
687 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
688 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
689 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
690 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
691 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
692 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
693 its visible semantics have not changed.
694
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000695- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
696 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
697
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000698Documentation
699-------------
700
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000701- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000702
703 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000704 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000705
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000706 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000707
708 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
709
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000710- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000711
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000712Tests
713-----
714
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000715- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000716 platforms that use the Makefile.
717
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000718- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
719 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
720 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
721
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000722
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000723What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
724=================================
725
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000726*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000727
728Core and builtins
729-----------------
730
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000731- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
732 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
733 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
734 objects now (one object instead of three).
735
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000736- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
737 Windows DLLs.
738
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000739- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
740 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000741
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000742- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
743 a new .pyc magic.
744
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000745- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
746 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
747 be there.
748
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000749- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
750 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
751 the LC_NUMERIC category.
752
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000753- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
754 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
755 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
756
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000757- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
758
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000759- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
760 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
761 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000762
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000763- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
764 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
765
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000766- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
767
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000768- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000769 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000770
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000771- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
772
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000773- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
774
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000775- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
776 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
777
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000778- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
779 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
780 Fixes bug #858016 .
781
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000782- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
783 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
784 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
785
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000786- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
787 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
788 improves their performance (about 35%).
789
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000790- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
791 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
792 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
793
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000794- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
795 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
796 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
797 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
798
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000799- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
800 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
801 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
802 length is not known).
803
804- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
805 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000806 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
807 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000808 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
809
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000810- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
811 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
812
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000813- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
814 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
815 keyword arguments.
816
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000817- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
818 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
819 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
820
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000821- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
822 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
823 cases.
824
825- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
826 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
827 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
828 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
829 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
830 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
831 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
832 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
833 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
834 a release build.
835
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000836- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
837 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
838
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000839- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000840 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000841
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000842- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
843 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
844 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
845 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
846 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
847 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
848 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
849 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
850 destroyed.
851
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000852- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
853 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
854 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
855 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
856 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
857 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
858 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
859 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
860
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000861- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
862 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
863 character other than a space.
864
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000865- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
866 by the function object or by the method object, the function
867 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
868 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
869 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
870 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
871 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
872 attributes with the same name.
873
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000874- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
875 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
876 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
877 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
878 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
879 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
880 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
881 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
882 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
883 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
884 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
885 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
886 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
887 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000888
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000889- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
890 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
891 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
892 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
893 This has been repaired.
894
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000895- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
896
897- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
898
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000899- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
900 over a sequence.
901
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000902- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000903 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000904
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000905- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
906
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000907- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
908 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
909 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
910 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
911 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
912 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
913 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
914 records with equal keys is unchanged).
915
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000916- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
917 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
918 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
919
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000920- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
921 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
922 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
923 freelist.
924
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000925- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
926 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
927
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000928- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
929 number.
930
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000931- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
932 a TypeError exception.
933
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000934- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
935 820195.
936
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000937- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
938 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
939 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
940
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000941- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000942 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
943 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000944
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000945- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
946 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
947 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
948
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000949- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
950 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000951 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000952
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000953- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000954 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
955 the first call.
956
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000957
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000958Extension modules
959-----------------
960
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000961- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
962 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
963
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000964- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
965 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
966 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
967 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
968 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
969 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
970 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000971
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000972- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
973
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000974- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
975
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000976- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
977 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
978
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000979- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
980 fewer false positives.
981
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000982- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
983 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
984
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000985- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000986 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
987
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000988- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000989 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000990 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +0000991 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
992 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000993
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000994- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
995 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
996 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
997 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
998
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000999- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1000 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1001 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1002 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1003 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1004 #897625.
1005
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001006- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1007 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1008
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001009- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1010 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1011 and pops on either side of the deque.
1012
1013- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1014 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1015
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001016- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1017 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1018 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1019 other functions that expect a function argument.
1020
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001021- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1022
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001023- os.getsid was added.
1024
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001025- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1026 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1027 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1028
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001029- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1030
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001031- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1032
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001033- readline.clear_history was added.
1034
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001035- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1036
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001037- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1038
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001039- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1040
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001041- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1042
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001043- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1044
1045- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1046
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001047- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1048
1049- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1050
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001051- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1052 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1053 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1054
1055- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1056 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1057 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1058 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1059 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1060 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1061 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1062
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001063- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1064 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1065 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1066 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001067
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001068- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001069 iterators from a single iterable.
1070
1071- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1072 of raising a TypeError exception.
1073
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001074- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1075 as parameter.
1076
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001077Library
1078-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001079
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001080- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1081 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1082 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001083
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001084- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1085 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1086 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001087
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001088- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001089
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001090- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1091 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001092
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001093- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1094 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1095
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001096- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1097
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001098- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001099 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001100
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001101- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001102 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001103
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001104- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1105
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001106- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1107 on cygwin and mingw32.
1108
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001109- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1110
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001111- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1112 module.
1113
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001114- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1115 installation scheme for all platforms.
1116
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001117- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001118 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001119
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001120- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1121 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1122 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1123
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001124- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1125 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1126 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1127
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001128- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1129
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001130- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1131
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001132- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1133 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1134
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001135- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1136 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1137 type pattern with the same value exists.
1138
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001139- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1140 when run from the command prompt).
1141
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001142- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1143 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1144
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001145- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1146 default sort).
1147
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001148- Added global runctx function to profile module
1149
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001150- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1151
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001152- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1153
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001154- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1155
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001156- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001157 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1158 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1159 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1160 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1161 accordingly.
1162
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001163- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1164 decoding standards.
1165
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001166- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1167 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1168 called for all requests.
1169
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001170- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1171 they are passed to the compiler.
1172
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001173- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1174 indent, width and depth.
1175
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001176- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1177 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1178
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001179- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1180 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1181
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001182- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1183
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001184- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1185
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001186- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1187
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001188- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1189 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1190
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001191- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001192 for better performance.
1193
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001194- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001195
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001196- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1197 a string).
1198
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001199- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1200
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001201- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1202
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001203- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1204
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001205- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1206
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001207- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1208 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1209 list of fieldnames.
1210
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001211- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1212 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1213
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001214- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1215
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001216- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1217 empty lists.
1218
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001219- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1220 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1221 and shelves.
1222
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001223- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1224 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1225
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001226- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001227 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1228 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001229
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001230- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1231 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001232 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001233
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001234- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001235 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1236 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1237
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001238- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1239 and removed in Py2.4.
1240
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001241- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1242
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001243- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1244
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001245Tools/Demos
1246-----------
1247
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001248- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1249 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1250
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001251- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1252
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001253- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1254 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1255 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1256 destination in situations where both files are given.
1257
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001258- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1259 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1260 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1261 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1262
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001263- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1264
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001265- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1266 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1267 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1268 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1269 now.
1270
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001271- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1272 in effect
1273
1274- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1275 C-c C-h
1276
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001277- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1278 -d option was given.
1279
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001280Build
1281-----
1282
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001283- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1284 build under OS X.
1285
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001286- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1287 --enable-profiling.
1288
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001289- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1290 is configured --with-tsc.
1291
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001292- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1293 on AMD64.
1294
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001295- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1296 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1297
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001298- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1299 removed.
1300
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001301- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1302 supported (see PEP 11).
1303
1304- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1305
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001306- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1307
1308- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1309 (see PEP 11).
1310
1311- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1312 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1313
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001314C API
1315-----
1316
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001317- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1318 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1319 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1320
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001321- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1322 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1323 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1324 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1325
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001326- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1327 generator objects.
1328
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001329- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1330 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001331 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1332 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001333
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001334- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1335 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1336
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001337- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1338 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1339 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1340 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1341 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1342
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001343- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1344 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1345 about 10% faster.
1346
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001347- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1348 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1349
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001350- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1351 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1352 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1353 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1354
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001355Windows
1356-------
1357
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001358- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1359 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1360 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1361 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1362
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001363- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1364 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1365 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1366
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001367
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001368What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1369===============================
1370
1371*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1372
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001373IDLE
1374----
1375
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001376- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1377 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1378 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1379 context-menu actions.
1380
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001381- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1382 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1383 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1384 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1385 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1386 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1387 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1388 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1389 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1390
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001391
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001392What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1393=============================================
1394
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001395*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001396
1397Core and builtins
1398-----------------
1399
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001400- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001401 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001402 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1403
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001404Extension modules
1405-----------------
1406
1407- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1408 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1409 than once. This has been fixed.
1410
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001411- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1412 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1413 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1414 call.
1415
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001416- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1417
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001418Library
1419-------
1420
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001421- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1422 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1423
1424- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1425 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1426 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1427 restored.
1428
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001429IDLE
1430----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001431
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001432- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001433
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001434Build
1435-----
1436
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001437- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1438 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1439
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001440C API
1441-----
1442
1443Windows
1444-------
1445
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001446- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1447 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1448
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001449- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1450
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001451Mac
1452---
1453
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001454- Various fixes to pimp.
1455
1456- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1457
1458- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1459 more problems than it solves.
1460
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001461
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001462What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1463=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001464
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001465*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1466
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001467Core and builtins
1468-----------------
1469
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001470- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1471 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1472
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001473- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1474 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001475 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001476
1477- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1478 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1479 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001480 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001481
1482- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1483 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001484
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001485- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1486 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1487 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1488
1489- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001490 770247.
1491
1492- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001493
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001494Extension modules
1495-----------------
1496
1497- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1498 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1499
1500- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1501
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001502- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1503
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001504- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1505 contained within the _strptime module.
1506
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001507- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1508 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1509
1510- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001511 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1512
1513- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1514 the find_class attribute, if present.
1515
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001516- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001517
1518 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1519 (SF bug 763298).
1520
1521 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001522 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1523 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1524 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001525
1526 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1527
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001528Library
1529-------
1530
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001531- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1532
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001533- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1534 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1535 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1536 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1537 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1538 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1539 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1540 or Tester().
1541
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001542- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1543 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1544 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1545 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1546 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1547 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1548 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1549 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1550 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001551
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001552 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001553
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001554- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1555 weren't before was an oversight.
1556
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001557- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1558 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1559
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001560- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1561 when there are no lines.
1562
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001563- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1564 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1565
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001566- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1567 to child processes.
1568
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001569- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1570
1571- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1572
1573- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1574 xmlrpclib.
1575
1576- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1577 responses.
1578
1579- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1580 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1581
1582- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1583 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1584 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1585
1586- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1587 used as patterns.
1588
1589- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1590 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1591 than Tk 8.3.
1592
1593- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1594
1595- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001596
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001597Tools/Demos
1598-----------
1599
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001600- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1601
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001602- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1603
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001604- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001605
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001606Build
1607-----
1608
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001609- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1610
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001611- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1612
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001613- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1614 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001615
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001616- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1617 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1618 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001619
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001620C API
1621-----
1622
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001623- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1624 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1625
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001626Windows
1627-------
1628
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001629- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1630 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1631 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1632 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1633 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1634 Python exception ::
1635
1636 thread.error: can't start new thread
1637
1638 is raised now.
1639
1640- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1641 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1642 instead of from DLL teardown.
1643
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001644Mac
1645---
1646
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001647- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001648 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001649 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1650 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1651 the executable in the bundle.
1652
1653- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001654
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001655- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1656
1657- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1658 on Panther.
1659
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001660What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1661================================
1662
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001663*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001664
1665Core and builtins
1666-----------------
1667
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001668- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1669 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1670 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1671 with the -i option.
1672
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001673- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1674 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1675
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001676- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1677 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1678
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001679- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1680 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1681 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1682 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1683 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1684 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1685 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1686 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1687 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1688 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1689 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1690 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1691 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001692
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001693- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1694 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1695 embedded in a lambda expression.
1696
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001697- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1698 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1699 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1700 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1701 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1702
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001703- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1704 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1705 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1706
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001707- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1708 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1709
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001710- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1711 It's writable again.
1712
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001713- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1714 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1715 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001716 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001717
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001718- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1719 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1720 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1721
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001722Extension modules
1723-----------------
1724
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001725- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1726 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1727
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001728- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1729 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1730 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1731 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1732
1733- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1734 collection.
1735
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001736- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1737 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1738 unique within a single program run.
1739
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001740- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1741 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1742
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001743- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1744 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1745
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001746- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1747 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001748
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001749- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1750
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001751- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1752 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1753
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001754- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1755 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1756 for many BSD-derived systems.
1757
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001758
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001759Library
1760-------
1761
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001762- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1763 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1764 primary ones:
1765
1766 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1767 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1768 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1769
1770 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1771 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1772 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1773 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1774 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1775 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1776
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001777- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1778 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1779 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1780 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1781 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1782 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1783 argument.
1784
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001785- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1786 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1787 in the archive.
1788
1789- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1790 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1791
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001792- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1793 569574).
1794
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001795- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1796 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1797 no more.
1798
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001799- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1800 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1801 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1802 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1803 code coverage.
1804
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001805- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1806 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1807 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001808 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1809 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001810
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001811- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1812 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1813 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001814 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001815
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001816- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1817
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001818- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1819 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1820 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1821 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1822
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001823- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1824 handling.
1825
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001826- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1827 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1828
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001829- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1830 in socket.py.
1831
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001832- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1833
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001834- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1835 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1836 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1837 opener with proxy support.
1838
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001839- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1840
1841- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1842
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001843Tools/Demos
1844-----------
1845
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001846- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1847
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001848- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1849
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001850- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1851 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001852
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001853- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1854 files.
1855
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001856Build
1857-----
1858
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001859- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001860 different root directory.
1861
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001862C API
1863-----
1864
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001865- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1866 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1867 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1868 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1869 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1870 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1871 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1872 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1873 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1874 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1875
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001876- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1877 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1878 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1879 from Python.
1880
1881
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001882New platforms
1883-------------
1884
1885None this time.
1886
1887Tests
1888-----
1889
1890- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1891 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1892
1893Windows
1894-------
1895
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001896- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1897
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001898- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1899 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1900 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1901 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1902 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1903 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1904 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1905 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1906 that's what it's for.
1907
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001908Mac
1909---
1910
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001911- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1912 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1913 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1914 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001915- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1916 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1917- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001918
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001919SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1920------------------------------------
1921
1922430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1923598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1924622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1925661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1926683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1927697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1928713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1929724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1930727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1931729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1932730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1933731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1934732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1935733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1936735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1937740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1938744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1939745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1940747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1941749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1942751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1943753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1944755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1945757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1946760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1947
1948
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001949What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1950================================
1951
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001952*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001953
1954Core and builtins
1955-----------------
1956
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001957- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1958 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1959
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001960- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1961 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1962 and cannot be strings).
1963
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001964- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1965 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1966 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1967 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1968
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001969- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1970 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1971 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1972 Python itself.
1973
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001974- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1975 the referenced object, if it has one.
1976
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001977- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1978 the thread started at
1979 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1980
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001981- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1982 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1983 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1984 placed on a list index.
1985
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001986- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1987 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1988 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1989 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1990
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001991- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1992 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1993 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1994 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1995 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1996 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1997 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1998
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001999- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2000 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2001 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2002 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2003 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2004
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002005- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2006 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002007
2008- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2009 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2010 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2011 #693195.)
2012
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002013- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2014 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002015
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002016- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002017 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002018 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2019 interpreter executions, would fail.
2020
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002021- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002022 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002023 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002024
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002025Extension modules
2026-----------------
2027
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002028- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2029 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2030 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2031 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2032
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002033- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2034 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2035
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002036- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2037 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2038 and Greg Chapman.)
2039
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002040- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2041 recursively.
2042
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002043- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002044 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2045 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2046 leaks.
2047
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002048- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2049
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002050- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2051 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2052 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2053 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2054 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2055 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2056 #705836.
2057
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002058- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002059 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2060
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002061- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2062 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2063 See SF bug #692416.
2064
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002065- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2066 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2067
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002068- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2069 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2070 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002071
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002072- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002073 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2074 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2075
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002076- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2077 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2078 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2079 timeouts to work properly.
2080
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002081Library
2082-------
2083
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002084- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2085 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2086 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2087 future release.
2088
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002089- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2090 for querying platform dependent features.
2091
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002092- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002093
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002094- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2095 pickle protocol versions.
2096
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002097- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2098 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2099 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2100
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002101- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2102
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002103- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2104 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2105 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2106 modules.
2107
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002108- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2109 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2110 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2111
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002112- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2113 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2114
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002115- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2116 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2117 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2118
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002119- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002120 MS Office extensions.
2121
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002122- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2123 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2124
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002125- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2126 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2127
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002128- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2129 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2130 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2131 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2132 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2133 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2134
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002135- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2136 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2137 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002138
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002139- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2140 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2141 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2142
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002143- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2144
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002145- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2146 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2147 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2148
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002149Tools/Demos
2150-----------
2151
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002152- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2153 See the module docstring for details.
2154
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002155Build
2156-----
2157
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002158- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2159 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002160
2161C API
2162-----
2163
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002164- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2165
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002166- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2167 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2168 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2169
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002170- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2171 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002172
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002173 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2174 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2175 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002176
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002177- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002178 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2179
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002180- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2181 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2182 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002183
2184New platforms
2185-------------
2186
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002187None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002188
2189Tests
2190-----
2191
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002192- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2193 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002194
2195Windows
2196-------
2197
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002198- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2199 function.
2200
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002201- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2202 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002203
2204Mac
2205---
2206
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002207- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2208 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002209
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002210- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2211 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002212
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002213- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2214 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2215 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002216
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002217- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002218 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2219 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002220
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002221- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2222 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002223
2224
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002225What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2226=================================
2227
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002228*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002229
2230Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002231-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002232
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002233- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2234 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2235 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2236
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002237- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2238 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2239 (SF patch #664376.)
2240
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002241- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2242 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2243 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2244 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2245 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2246 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002247 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002248
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002249- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2250 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2251 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2252 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002253 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002254
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002255- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2256 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2257 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2258 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2259 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2260 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2261 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2262 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2263 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2264 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2265 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2266
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002267- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2268 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2269 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2270 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2271 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2272 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2273
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002274- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2275 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2276
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002277- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2278 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2279 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2280 case.)
2281
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002282- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2283 passed as unicode strings.
2284
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002285- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2286 See SF bug #683467.
2287
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002288- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2289 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2290
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002291- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2292
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002293- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2294
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002295- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2296 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2297 arguments.
2298
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002299- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2300 See SF bug #667147.
2301
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002302- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002303 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002304 See SF bug #676155.
2305
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002306- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002307 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002308 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2309 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2310 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2311 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2312 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2313 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002314
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002315Extension modules
2316-----------------
2317
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002318- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2319 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2320 tp_as_number pointer.
2321
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002322- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2323 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2324 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2325 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2326 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2327
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002328- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2329
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002330- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2331
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002332- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002333 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002334 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2335 patch #678531.)
2336
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002337- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2338 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2339
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002340- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2341 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2342
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002343- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2344
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002345- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2346 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2347 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2348
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002349- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2350
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002351- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2352 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2353
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002354- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002355
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002356- datetime changes:
2357
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002358 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2359
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002360 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2361 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2362 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2363 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2364 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2365 now.
2366
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002367 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002368 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2369 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002370
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002371 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002372 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002373 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2374 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2375 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2376 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002377
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002378 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2379 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2380 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002381 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2382
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002383 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2384 by a later example coded by Guido.
2385
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002386 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002387 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2388 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2389 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002390 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2391 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2392
2393 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2394 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2395 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2396 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2397 tzinfo subclass instance.
2398
2399 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2400 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2401 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2402 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2403 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2404 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2405 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2406 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002407
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002408 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2409 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2410 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2411 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2412 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002413 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2414
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002415 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002416
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002417 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2418 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2419 as a naive datetime object.
2420
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002421 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2422 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2423 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2424
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002425 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2426 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2427 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2428 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2429 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2430 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2431 comparison.
2432
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002433 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2434 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2435 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2436 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002437 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002438
2439 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002440
2441 and ::
2442
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002443 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2444
2445 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2446 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2447 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2448 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2449
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002450 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2451 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2452 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2453 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2454 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2455
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002456 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2457 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002458 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2459 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002460
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002461Library
2462-------
2463
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002464- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2465 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2466
2467- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2468 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2469 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2470 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2471 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2472 See PEP 307 for details.
2473
2474- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2475 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2476
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002477- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2478 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002479 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002480 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2481 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002482 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002483
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002484- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2485 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2486
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002487- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2488 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2489 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2490
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002491- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2492
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002493- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2494 exception.
2495
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002496- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2497 class.
2498
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002499- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2500 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2501 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2502
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002503- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2504 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2505
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002506- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002507 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2508 See SF bug #659228.
2509
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002510- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2511 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2512 See SF patch #651082.
2513
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002514- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002515
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002516- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2517 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2518
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002519- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002520 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002521
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002522- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2523 DOS paths from other platforms.
2524
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002525Tools/Demos
2526-----------
2527
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002528- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2529 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2530 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2531 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2532 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2533 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2534 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2535 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2536 example:
2537
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002538 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2539 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002540
2541 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2542
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002543
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002544Build
2545-----
2546
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002547- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2548 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2549 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002550 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2551
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002552 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2553
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002554- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2555 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2556 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2557 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2558 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2559 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2560 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2561 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2562 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2563
2564- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2565 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2566 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2567 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2568
2569- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2570 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2571
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002572C API
2573-----
2574
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002575- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2576 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002577
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002578- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2579 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2580 tp_as_number pointer.
2581
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002582- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2583 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2584 (SF #681367)
2585
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002586- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2587 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2588 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2589 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002590
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002591Tests
2592-----
2593
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002594- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002595 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2596 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2597 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2598 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2599 pydoc.)
2600
2601- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2602
2603- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002604
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002605Windows
2606-------
2607
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002608- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2609 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2610 time).
2611
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002612- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2613 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2614
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002615- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2616 release without strong cryptography.
2617
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002618- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002619 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002620
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002621- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2622 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2623
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002624Mac
2625---
2626
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002627- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2628 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002629
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002630- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2631 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2632 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002633
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002634- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2635 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002636
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002637- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2638 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2639 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2640 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002641
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002642- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002643 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2644 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2645 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002646
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002647
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002648What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002649=================================
2650
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002651*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002652
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002653Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002654--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002655
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002656- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2657
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002658- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2659 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002660 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002661 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002662 a different meaning than before.
2663
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002664- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002665 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002666 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002667
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002668- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002669 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002670 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002671
2672- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2673 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2674 and deallocation.
2675
2676- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2677 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2678
2679- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2680 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2681 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2682 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2683 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2684
2685- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2686 now detected by the garbage collector.
2687
2688- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2689 [SF bug 519621]
2690
2691- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2692 identifier.
2693
2694- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2695 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2696 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2697 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2698 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2699 [SF bug 563060]
2700
2701- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2702 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2703 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2704 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2705 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2706
2707- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2708 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2709 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2710
2711- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2712
2713- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2714 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2715 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2716 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2717 state of the slots would be lost.)
2718
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002719Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002720-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002721
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002722- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002723 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2724 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2725 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2726 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002727 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2728 Jython 2.1.
2729
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002730- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002731 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002732 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2733 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2734 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2735 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2736 these, see PEP 302.
2737
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002738- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2739 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2740 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2741
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002742- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2743 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2744 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2745
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002746- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2747 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2748 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2749
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002750- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2751 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2752 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2753 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2754 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2755 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2756 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2757 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2758 releases or implementations.
2759
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002760- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002761 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2762 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002763
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002764- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2765 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2766
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002767- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2768 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2769 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2770
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002771- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2772 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2773
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002774- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2775 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002776 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2777 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002778
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002779- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2780 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2781 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2782 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2783 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2784
2785 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2786 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2787 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2788 pattern.
2789
2790 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2791 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2792 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2793 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2794
2795 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2796 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2797 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2798 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2799 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2800 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2801
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002802- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2803 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2804 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2805 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2806 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2807 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2808 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2809 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002810
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002811- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2812 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2813 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2814 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2815 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002816 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2817 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2818 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2819 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2820 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2821 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2822 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002823
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002824- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2825 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2826
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002827- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2828 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2829 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2830 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2831 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2832 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2833 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2834 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2835 to Zack Weinberg!
2836
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002837- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2838 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2839 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2840 type. This has been fixed now.
2841
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002842- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2843 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2844 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2845
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002846- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2847 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2848 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2849 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2850 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2851 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2852 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2853 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002854 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002855
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002856- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2857 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2858 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002859
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002860- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2861 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2862 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2863 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2864 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2865 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2866 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2867 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002868 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002869 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2870 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2871
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002872- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2873 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2874 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2875 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2876 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2877 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2878 this.)
2879
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002880- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2881 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002882 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002883 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002884 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2885 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002886 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2887 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002888
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002889- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2890 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2891 currently running.
2892
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002893- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2894 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2895 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2896 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2897
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002898- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2899 as directory names.
2900
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002901- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2902 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2903
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002904- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2905 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2906
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002907- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002908 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2909 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002910
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002911- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2912 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2913 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2914 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2915 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2916
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002917- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2918 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2919 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2920 removed.
2921
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002922- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2923 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2924 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2925
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002926- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2927 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2928 to __debug__.
2929
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002930- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2931 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2932 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2933
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002934- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2935 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2936 deprecated now.
2937
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002938- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2939 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2940 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002941
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002942- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2943 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2944 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2945 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2946 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002947
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002948- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2949 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2950
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002951- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2952 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2953 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002954 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002955 is backward compatible.
2956
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002957- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2958 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2959 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2960 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2961 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2962
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002963- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2964 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2965 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2966 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2967 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2968 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002969
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002970- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2971 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2972
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002973- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2974 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2975
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002976- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2977 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2978 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2979 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2980 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2981
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002982- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2983 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2984 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2985
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002986- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002987 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2988
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002989- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2990 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2991 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002992
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002993- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2994 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2995
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002996- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2997 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2998 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2999
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003000- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3001
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003002Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003003-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003004
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003005- Added three operators to the operator module:
3006 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3007 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3008 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3009
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003010- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3011
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003012- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3013 archives.
3014
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003015- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3016 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3017 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3018
3019 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3020
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003021- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3022 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3023 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003024 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003025
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003026- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3027 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3028 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3029 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003030 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3031 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3032 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3033 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003034
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003035- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3036 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003037
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003038- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3039
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003040- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3041 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3042
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003043- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3044 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3045 supported.
3046
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003047- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3048
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003049- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3050 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003051
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003052- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3053 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3054
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003055- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3056
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003057- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3058 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3059
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003060- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3061 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3062 functions but callable type objects.
3063
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003064- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003065 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003066 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003067
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003068- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3069 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003070
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003071- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3072 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003073
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003074- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3075 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3076 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3077 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3078
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003079- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3080 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003081
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003082- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3083 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3084 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3085 and __imul__.
3086
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003087- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003088 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3089 is called.
3090
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003091- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3092 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3093 interpreter was compiled.
3094
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003095- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3096 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3097 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003098 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003099 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3100 1, not 2.
3101
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003102- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3103 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3104 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3105 limit.
3106
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003107- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3108 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3109 bug #623464.
3110
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003111- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3112 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3113 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3114 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3115
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003116Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003117-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003118
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003119- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3120
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003121- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3122 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3123 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3124 with Python 2.3a2.
3125
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003126- os.path exposes getctime.
3127
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003128- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003129 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003130 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003131 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003132 unit tests of floating point results.
3133
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003134- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3135 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3136 has been increased.
3137
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003138- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3139 executed.
3140
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003141- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3142 postinstallation script.
3143
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003144- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3145 test the current module.
3146
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003147- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003148 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3149 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3150 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3151 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3152
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003153- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003154 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003155 Ward's Optik package.
3156
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003157- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3158 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3159 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3160 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3161
3162- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3163 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003164 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003165
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003166- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3167 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3168 shelf are binary pickles.
3169
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003170- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3171 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3172
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003173- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3174 modules are iterators now.
3175
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003176- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3177 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3178 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3179 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3180 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3181 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003182
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003183- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3184 with their entity value.
3185
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003186- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3187
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003188- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3189 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003190
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003191- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3192 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003193 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003194
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003195- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3196 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3197 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3198 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3199 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3200 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3201 main():
3202
3203 import locale
3204 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3205
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003206- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3207 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3208
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003209- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3210 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3211 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3212 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3213 to the new standard.
3214
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003215- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3216 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3217 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3218 an extension to the database.
3219
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003220- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3221 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3222 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3223 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003224 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003225
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003226- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003227 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003228
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003229- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3230 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3231 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3232 bounded integers.
3233
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003234- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3235 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3236 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3237 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3238 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3239 in existence.
3240
3241 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3242 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3243 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3244 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3245 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3246 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3247
3248 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3249 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3250 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3251 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3252
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003253- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3254 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3255 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3256
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003257- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3258
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003259- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3260 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3261 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3262 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3263
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003264- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3265 argument.
3266
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003267- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3268 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3269 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3270 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3271 [SF patch 560794].
3272
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003273- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3274 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3275 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003276 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3277 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3278 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003279
3280- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3281 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003282
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003283- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3284 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3285 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3286 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003287
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003288- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3289 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3290 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3291 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3292 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3293
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003294- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003295
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003296- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3297
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003298- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3299 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3300 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3301 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3302 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3303 identical to None.
3304
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003305- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3306 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3307 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3308 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3309 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3310 results now.
3311
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003312- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3313 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3314
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003315- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3316 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3317 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3318 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3319 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3320 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3321 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3322 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3323
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003324- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3325
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003326- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3327 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3328
3329- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3330 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3331 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3332 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3333 and other systems.
3334
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003335- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3336 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3337 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3338 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 +00003339 work well with these.
3340
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003341- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3342
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003343- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003344 connections.
3345
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003346- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3347 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3348 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3349
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003350- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3351 sets
3352
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003353- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3354 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3355 name.
3356
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003357- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3358 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3359 passed in.
3360
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003361- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003362 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003363 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3364 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003365
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003366- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3367
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003368- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3369
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003370- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3371 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3372 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3373
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003374- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3375 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3376 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3377 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003378 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003379
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003380- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003381 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003382 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003383
3384- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3385 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3386 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3387
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003388- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003389 the value of its expression argument.
3390
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003391- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3392 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3393 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3394
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003395- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3396 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3397 skipstone browser was included.
3398
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003399- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3400 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3401
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003402Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003403-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003404
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003405- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3406 names in addition to accepting file names.
3407
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003408- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3409 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3410 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3411 still used and useful.)
3412
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003413- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3414 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3415 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3416 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003417
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003418- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3419 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3420 the generated binary.
3421
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003422Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003423-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003424
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003425- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3426
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003427- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3428 except in the hands of experts.
3429
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003430- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003431 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3432 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3433 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003434
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003435- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3436 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3437 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3438 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3439 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3440 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3441 builds.
3442
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003443- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3444 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3445 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3446 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3447 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3448 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3449 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3450 new type.
3451
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003452- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003453
3454 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3455 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3456 positive infinities.
3457
3458 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3459 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3460 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3461 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3462 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3463 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3464 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3465
3466 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3467
3468 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3469
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003470- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3471 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3472 size of the executable.
3473
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003474- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3475 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3476 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3477 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003478
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003479- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3480
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003481- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3482 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3483 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003484
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003485- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3486 well as Unix.
3487
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003488- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3489 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3490 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3491 modules in the README file for details.
3492
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003493C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003494-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003495
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003496- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3497 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003498 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003499 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003500 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003501
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003502- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3503 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3504 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3505 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3506 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3507 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003508 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003509 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3510 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3511 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3512 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3513 aligned.)
3514
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003515- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3516 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3517 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3518
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003519- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3520 level.
3521
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003522- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3523 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3524 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3525 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3526 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3527
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003528- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3529 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3530 code.
3531
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003532- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3533 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3534 adjusting for negative indices.
3535
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003536- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3537 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3538 object.
3539
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003540- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3541 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3542 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3543
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003544- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3545 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003546
3547- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3548
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003549- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3550 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3551 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3552 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3553
3554- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3555
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003556- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003557
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003558- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003559 without going through the buffer API.
3560
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003561- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003562
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003563- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3564 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3565 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3566 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3567
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003568- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3569 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3570
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003571- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003572 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3573
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003574New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003575-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003576
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003577- OpenVMS is now supported.
3578
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003579- AtheOS is now supported.
3580
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003581- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3582
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003583- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3584
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003585Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003586-----
3587
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003588- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3589 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3590 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003591
3592Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003593-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003594
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003595- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3596 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3597 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3598 bugs.
3599 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003600 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003601 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3602 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003603 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003604
3605- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003606 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003607
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003608- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3609 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3610
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003611- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3612 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003613 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003614 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3615
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003616- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3617 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3618 use files" uninstall option).
3619
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003620- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3621
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003622- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3623 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3624
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003625- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3626 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3627 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3628
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003629- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3630 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3631 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3632 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3633 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003634 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3635 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3636 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003637
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003638- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003639 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003640 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3641 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3642 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3643 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3644 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3645 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3646 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3647 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3648 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3649 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3650 work around.
3651
3652- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3653 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3654 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3655 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3656 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3657 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3658 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3659 specified with O_CREAT too).
3660
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003661Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003662----
3663
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003664- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003665
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003666- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3667 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3668 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3669
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003670- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3671 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3672 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3673
3674- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3675 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3676 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3677 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3678 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3679 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3680 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3681 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003682
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003683- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3684 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3685 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003686
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003687- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3688 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3689 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3690 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3691 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003692
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003693- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3694 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3695 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003696
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003697- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3698 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003699
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003700- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3701 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3702 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3703 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3704 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003705
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003706- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3707 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3708 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3709
3710- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3711 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3712 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003713
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003714- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3715 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3716 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3717 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003718 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003719
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003720- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3721 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003722
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003723- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3724 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003725
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003726- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003727 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003728 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3729 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003730
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003731
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003732What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003733===============================
3734
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003735*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3736
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003737Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003738--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003739
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003740- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3741 with a custom metaclass.
3742
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003743Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003744-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003745
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003746- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3747 are proxies.
3748
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003749Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003750-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003751
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003752- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3753 very short strings.
3754
3755- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3756 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3757 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3758 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3759 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3760
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003761Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003762-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003763
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003764- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3765 close or delete time).
3766
3767- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3768 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3769
3770- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3771
3772- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003773 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003774
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003775Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003776-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003777
3778Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003779-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003780
3781C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003782-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003783
3784New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003785-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003786
3787Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003788-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003789
3790Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003791-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003792
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003793- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3794
3795- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3796 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3797
3798- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3799 deleted at process exit time.
3800
3801- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3802 in backslash.
3803
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003804Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003805----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003806
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003807- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3808 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3809 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3810
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003811
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003812What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003813===========================
3814
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003815*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3816
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003817Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003818--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003819
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003820- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3821 been extensively updated. See
3822
3823 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3824
3825 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3826
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003827- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3828 deleted!
3829
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003830- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3831 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3832 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3833 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3834 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3835
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003836- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3837
3838 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3839 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3840
3841 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3842 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3843 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3844 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3845 supported anyway.
3846
3847 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3848 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3849
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003850- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3851 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3852 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3853 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3854 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003855
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003856- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3857 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3858 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3859
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003860Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003861-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003862
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003863- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3864 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3865 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3866 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3867 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3868 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003869 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3870 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3871 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3872 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003873
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003874- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3875 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3876 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3877
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003878Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003879-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003880
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003881- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3882
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003883Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003884-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003885
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003886- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3887 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3888 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3889 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3890 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3891 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3892
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003893- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3894
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003895- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3896
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003897- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3898
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003899- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3900 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3901 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3902
3903- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3904
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003905Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003906-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003907
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003908- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3909 off a search on Google.
3910
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003911Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003912-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003913
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003914- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3915 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3916 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3917 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3918 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3919 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3920 other platforms should do likewise.
3921
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003922- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3923 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3924 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3925
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003926C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003927-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003928
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003929- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3930 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3931 producing key-value pairs.
3932
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003933- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003934 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003935 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3936 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3937 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3938 previously went unchallenged.
3939
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003940New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003941-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003942
3943Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003944-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003945
3946Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003947-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003948
3949Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003950----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003951
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003952- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3953 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003954
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003955- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3956 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3957 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3958 home.
3959
3960
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003961What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003962===========================
3963
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003964*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3965
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003966Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003967--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003968
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003969- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3970 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003971
3972 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003973 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003974
3975 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3976 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003977 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003978 This needs to be documented.
3979
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003980- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3981 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3982
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003983- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3984 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3985 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3986
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003987- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3988 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3989
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003990- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3991 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3992 class forbids it).
3993
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003994- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3995 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3996 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3997
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003998- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3999
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004000Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004001-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004002
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004003- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4004 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004005 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004006
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004007- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4008 (like 1 + '').
4009
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004010Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004011-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004012
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004013- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4014 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4015 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4016 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004017 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004018 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4019
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004020- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4021 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4022 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4023 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4024
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004025- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4026 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004027 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4028 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4029 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004030
4031- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4032 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004033
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004034- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4035 bytes on its input.
4036
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004037Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004038-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004039
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004040- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004041 convenience function.
4042
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004043- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4044 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4045 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004046 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4047 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4048 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4049 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4050 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4051 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004052
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004053- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4054 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4055 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4056 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4057
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004058- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4059 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4060 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4061
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004062- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4063 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4064 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4065 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4066
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004067- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4068 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004069 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004070 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4071 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4072 new -l and -e options.
4073
4074- statcache is now deprecated.
4075
4076- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4077 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004078 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004079 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4080 time properly taken into account.
4081
4082- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4083 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4084 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4085 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4086
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004087Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004088-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004089
4090Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004091-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004092
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004093- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4094 is built with libdb3 if available.
4095
4096- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4097
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004098C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004099-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004100
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004101- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4102 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4103 PySequence_Size().
4104
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004105- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4106
4107- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4108 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4109 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4110
4111- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4112 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4113
4114- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4115 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4116
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004117New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004118-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004119
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004120- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4121 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4122
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004123- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4124 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4125
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004126- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4127
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004128Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004129-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004130
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004131- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4132 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4133
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004134Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004135-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004136
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004137Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004138----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004139
4140- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4141 removed completely in the next release.
4142
4143- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4144 OSX.
4145
4146- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4147 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4148
4149- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4150
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004151
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004152What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004153===========================
4154
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004155*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4156
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004157Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004158--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004159
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004160- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004161 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004162 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004163 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4164 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004165 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4166 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004167 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4168 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004169
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004170- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4171 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4172
4173- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4174 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4175
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004176Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004177-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004178
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004179- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4180 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4181 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4182 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4183 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4184 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4185 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4186 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4187
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004188- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4189 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4190 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4191 example).
4192
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004193- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004194 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004195 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004196 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004197
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004198- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4199 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4200 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004201 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004202
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004203- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4204 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4205 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4206 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4207 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4208 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4209
4210 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4211
4212 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4213
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004214Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004215-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004216
4217- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4218
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004219- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4220
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004221- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4222 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004223
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004224- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4225 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4226 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4227 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4228 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4229 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004230 attributes.
4231
4232- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4233 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4234 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004235
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004236- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4237 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4238 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004239
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004240- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4241 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4242 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004243 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4244 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4245
4246- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4247 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004248
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004249Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004250-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004251
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004252- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4253 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4254
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004255- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4256 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4257 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4258 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4259
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004260- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4261 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4262 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4263 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4264
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004265 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4266 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4267 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4268 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4269 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4270 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4271 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4272 without losing information).
4273
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004274- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004275 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4276 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4277 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4278 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4279 module).
4280
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004281 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004282 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4283 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4284 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4285 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004286
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004287- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004288 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4289 encoding.
4290
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004291- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4292 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4293
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004294- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004295 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4296
4297- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4298 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4299 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4300 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4301
4302- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4303
4304- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4305 ON, and OFF.
4306
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004307- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4308 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4309
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004310Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004311-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004312
4313- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4314 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4315 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004316
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004317- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4318 been added: -X and -E.
4319
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004320Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004321-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004322
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004323- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4324 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4325
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004326C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004327-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004328
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004329- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4330 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4331 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4332 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4333 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4334
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004335- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4336 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4337 as long) arguments.
4338
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004339- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4340 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4341 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4342 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4343 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4344 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4345
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004346- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4347 input.
4348
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004349New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004350-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004351
4352Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004353-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004354
4355Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004356-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004357
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004358- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4359 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4360 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4361
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004362- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4363 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4364 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004365 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004366
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004367 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4368 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4369 import signal
4370 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004371
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004372 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004373 while 1:
4374 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004375 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004376 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4377 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4378 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4379 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004380
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004381
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004382What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4383===========================
4384
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004385*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4386
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004387Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004388--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004389
4390- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4391 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4392 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4393
4394- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4395 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4396 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4397 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4398 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4399 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4400 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004401
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004402- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004403 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004404 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4405 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4406 associate a docstring with a property.
4407
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004408- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4409 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4410 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4411 other built-in object types.
4412
4413- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4414 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4415 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4416 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4417 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4418
4419- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4420 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4421
4422- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4423 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004424 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004425 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4426 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4427 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4428 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4429 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4430
4431- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4432 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4433 class.
4434
4435- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4436 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4437 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4438 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4439
4440- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4441 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4442 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4443 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4444
4445- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4446 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4447
4448- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4449 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4450 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4451 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4452 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004453 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004454 with the same value as s.
4455
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004456- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4457
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004458Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004459----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004460
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004461- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4462
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004463- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4464 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4465 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4466 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4467 objects.
4468
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004469- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4470 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004471 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4472 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4473
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004474- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4475 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4476 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4477
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004478Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004479-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004480
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004481- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4482 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4483 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4484 by the instances.
4485
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004486- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4487 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4488 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4489
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004490- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4491 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4492 before the entire comparison is complete.
4493
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004494- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4495 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4496 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4497
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004498- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4499 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4500 getwriter().
4501
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004502- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4503 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4504
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004505- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004506 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4507 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4508
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004509- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4510 iterable object.
4511
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004512- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4513 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004514
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004515- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4516 authentication.
4517
4518- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4519 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004520
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004521- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004522 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4523 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4524 a sample driver.)
4525
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004526Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004527-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004528
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004529- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4530 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4531 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4532 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4533 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4534 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4535 kernel has large file support.
4536
4537- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4538 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4539 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4540 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4541 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4542
4543- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4544 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4545 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4546
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004547C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004548-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004549
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004550- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4551 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4552
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004553New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004554-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004555
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004556- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4557 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4558
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004559Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004560-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004561
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004562- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4563 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4564 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4565 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4566 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4567
4568- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4569 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4570 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4571 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4572
4573- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4574 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4575
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004576Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004577-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004578
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004579- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004580 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4581 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004582
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004583
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004584What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4585===========================
4586
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004587*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4588
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004589Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004590----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004591
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004592- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4593 big to represent as a C double.
4594
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004595- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4596 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4597 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4598 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4599 restriction).
4600
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004601- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4602 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4603 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4604 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4605 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4606
4607 >>> dir([])
4608 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4609 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4610 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4611 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4612 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4613 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4614 'reverse', 'sort']
4615
4616 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4617
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004618- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004619 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4620 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4621 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4622 OverflowError exception.
4623
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004624- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004625 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004626 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4627 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4628 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4629 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4630 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004631 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004632 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4633 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4634
4635 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4636 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4637 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4638 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004639
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004640- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004641 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4642 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4643 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4644 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4645 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4646 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4647 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4648 once it is created.
4649
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004650- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4651 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4652 (key, value) pairs.
4653
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004654- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004655 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4656 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4657
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004658- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4659 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4660 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4661 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4662 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004663
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004664- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004665 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4666 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4667
4668 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4669
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004670- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004671 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4672
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004673Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004674-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004675
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004676- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004677 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4678 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004679
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004680- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4681 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4682 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4683 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4684 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4685 in this area anymore).
4686
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004687- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4688 threading.Timer.
4689
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004690- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4691 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4692
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004693- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004694 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4695
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004696- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004697 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4698 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4699 converted to Python longs.
4700
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004701- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004702 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4703
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004704- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4705 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4706 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4707
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004708Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004709-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004710
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004711- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4712 division operators as per PEP 238.
4713
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004714Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004715-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004716
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004717- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4718 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4719 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4720 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4721
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004722C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004723-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004724
4725- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004726
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004727- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4728 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004729 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004730
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004731 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4732 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004733 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004734 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004735
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004736- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004737 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4738 module:
4739
4740 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004741
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004742 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4743 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004744
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004745 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4746 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004747
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004748 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4749
4750 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4751
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004752- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004753 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4754 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4755 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004756
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004757New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004758-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004759
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004760- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4761 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4762 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4763 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4764 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004765
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004766Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004767-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004768
4769Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004770-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004771
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004772- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4773 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4774 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4775 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004776 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4777 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4778 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4779 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4780 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004781
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004782- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004783 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4784
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004785
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004786What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4787===========================
4788
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004789*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4790
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004791Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004792-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004793
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004794- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4795 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4796
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004797- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4798 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4799 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004800
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004801- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4802 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4803 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4804 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004805
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004806- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4807
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004808- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004809
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004810Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004811-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004812
4813- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004814 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004815 the module docstring for details.
4816
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004817Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004818-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004819
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004820- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004821 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4822 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4823 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004824
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004825- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4826 Nick Mathewson.
4827
4828Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004829----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004830
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004831- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4832 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4833 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4834 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4835 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4836 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4837 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4838 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4839
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004840- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4841 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4842 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4843 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4844
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004845- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4846 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4847 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4848 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4849 come a long way).
4850
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004851- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4852 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4853 write filters for these warnings).
4854
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004855- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4856 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4857 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4858 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4859 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4860
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004861- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4862 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4863 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4864 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4865 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4866 older distribution.
4867
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004868Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004869-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004870
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004871- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4872 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004873 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004874
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004875- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4876 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4877 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4878
4879- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4880
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004881- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4882
4883- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4884
4885- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4886
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004887- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004888
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004889- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4890
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004891New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004892-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004893
4894C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004895-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004896
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004897- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4898 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4899 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4900 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4901 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4902 against buffer overruns.
4903
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004904- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004905 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4906 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004907 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4908 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4909 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4910
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004911- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4912 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4913 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4914 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4915 deprecated.
4916
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004917Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004918-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004919
4920- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4921 relevant is found.
4922
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004923
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004924What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004925===========================
4926
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004927*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4928
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004929Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004930----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004931
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004932- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4933 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4934 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4935 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4936 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4937 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4938 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4939 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004940 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004941 repaired.
4942
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004943- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004944 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004945 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4946 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4947 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4948 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4949 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4950 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4951 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4952 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4953
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004954- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4955 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4956 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4957 leading BMO character).
4958
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004959- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4960 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4961 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4962
4963 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4964 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4965 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004966
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004967 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4968 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4969 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4970 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4971 for various simple to use conversions.
4972
4973 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4974 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4975
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004976 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4977 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4978 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4979 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4980 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4981 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4982 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4983 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4984 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4985 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4986 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4987 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4988 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4989 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4990 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004991
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004992- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4993 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4994 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004995 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004996 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004997
4998 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004999 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5000 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5001 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5002 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5003 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005004 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5005 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005006
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005007 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5008 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5009 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005010 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005011
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005012- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5013 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5014 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5015 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5016 floating arithmetic,
5017
5018 x = 9007199254740992.0
5019 print long(x)
5020
5021 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5022 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5023 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5024 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5025 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5026 functions are of good quality).
5027
5028 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5029 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5030 algorithms to break.
5031
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005032- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5033 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5034 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5035 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5036 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5037 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5038 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5039 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5040 order.
5041
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005042- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5043 operation along the most common code paths.
5044
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005045- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5046 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5047
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005048- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5049 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5050 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5051 {}.update(UserDict())
5052
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005053- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5054 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5055 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5056 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5057 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5058 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5059 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5060 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5061
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005062- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005063 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005064
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005065 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005066 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5067 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005068 join() method of strings
5069 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005070 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5071 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005072 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005073 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005074
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005075- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5076 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5077
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005078- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5079 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5080
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005081- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5082 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5083 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5084 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5085
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005086- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5087 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005088 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005089 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5090 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005091
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005092- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5093
5094
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005095Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005096-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005097
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005098- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005099 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005100 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5101 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5102
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005103- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5104 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5105
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005106- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5107 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5108 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5109 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5110
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005111- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5112 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5113 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5114
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005115- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5116
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005117- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5118
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005119- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5120 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5121 that are still imported into string.py).
5122
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005123- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5124
5125- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5126 Now it does.
5127
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005128- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5129
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005130- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5131 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5132 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5133 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5134 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005135 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5136 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005137
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005138- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5139 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5140 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5141 'help(object)'.
5142
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005143Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005144-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005145
5146- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005147 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005148 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5149 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5150
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005151- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005152 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5153 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005154
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005155C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005156-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005157
5158- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5159 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005160
5161----
5162
5163**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**