blob: fb829b9f3daac511c58e8d71e364a832570d65a1 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +000015- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
16 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
17 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
18 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
19 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
20
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +000021- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
22 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +000023
24- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
25 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
26 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
27 #693195.)
28
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +000029- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
30 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000031
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000032- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +000033 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000034 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
35 interpreter executions, would fail.
36
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +000037- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
38 TypeError. See SF patch #710127.
39
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000040Extension modules
41-----------------
42
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +000043- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
44 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
45 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
46 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
47 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
48 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
49 #705836.
50
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +000051- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzet()
52 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
53
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +000054- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
55 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
56 See SF bug #692416.
57
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +000058- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
59 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
60
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +000061- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
62 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
63 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000064
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +000065- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
66 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
67 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
68 timeouts to work properly.
69
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000070Library
71-------
72
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +000073- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
74 MS Office extensions.
75
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +000076- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
77 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
78
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +000079- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
80 execution speed of expressions and statements.
81
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +000082- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
83 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
84 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
85 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
86 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
87 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
88
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +000089- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
90 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
91 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000092
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +000093- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
94 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
95 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
96
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +000097- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
98
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000099Tools/Demos
100-----------
101
102TBD
103
104Build
105-----
106
Neal Norwitz2c92c6e2003-02-28 17:24:00 +0000107- Fix build problems when _iconv_codec failed. (SF bug #690012.)
108
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000109- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
110 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000111
112C API
113-----
114
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000115- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG.
116
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000117- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000118 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
119
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000120- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
121 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
122 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000123
124New platforms
125-------------
126
127TBD
128
129Tests
130-----
131
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000132- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
133 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000134
135Windows
136-------
137
138TBD
139
140Mac
141---
142
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000143- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
144 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000145
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000146- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
147 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000148
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000149- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
150 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
151 before displaying.
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000152
153- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
154 be used by mere mortals.
155
156- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
157 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000158
159
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000160What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
161=================================
162
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000163*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000164
165Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000166-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000167
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000168- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
169 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
170 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
171
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000172- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
173 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
174 (SF patch #664376.)
175
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000176- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
177 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
178 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
179 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
180 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
181 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000182 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000183
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000184- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
185 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
186 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
187 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000188 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000189
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000190- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
191 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
192 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
193 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
194 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
195 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
196 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
197 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
198 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
199 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
200 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
201
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000202- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
203 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
204 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
205 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
206 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
207 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
208
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000209- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
210 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
211
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000212- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
213 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
214 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
215 case.)
216
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000217- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
218 passed as unicode strings.
219
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000220- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
221 See SF bug #683467.
222
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000223- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
224 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
225
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000226- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
227
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000228- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
229
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000230- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
231 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
232 arguments.
233
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000234- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
235 See SF bug #667147.
236
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000237- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000238 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000239 See SF bug #676155.
240
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000241- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000242 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000243 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
244 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
245 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
246 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
247 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
248 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000249
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000250Extension modules
251-----------------
252
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000253- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
254 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
255 tp_as_number pointer.
256
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000257- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
258 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
259 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
260 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
261 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
262
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000263- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
264
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000265- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
266
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000267- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000268 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000269 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
270 patch #678531.)
271
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000272- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
273 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
274
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000275- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
276 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
277
Martin v. Löwis9789aef2003-01-26 11:30:36 +0000278- A new module _iconv_codec has been added, to expose the iconv(3)
279 library.
280
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000281- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
282
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000283- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
284 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
285 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
286
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000287- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
288
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000289- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
290 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
291
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000292- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000293
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000294- datetime changes:
295
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000296 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
297 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
298 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
299 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
300 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
301 now.
302
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000303 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000304 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
305 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000306
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000307 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000308 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000309 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
310 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
311 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
312 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000313
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000314 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
315 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
316 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000317 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
318
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000319 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
320 by a later example coded by Guido.
321
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000322 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000323 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
324 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
325 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000326 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
327 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
328
329 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
330 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
331 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
332 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
333 tzinfo subclass instance.
334
335 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
336 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
337 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
338 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
339 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
340 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
341 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
342 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000343
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000344 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
345 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
346 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
347 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
348 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000349 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
350
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000351 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000352
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000353 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
354 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
355 as a naive datetime object.
356
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000357 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
358 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
359 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
360
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000361 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
362 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
363 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
364 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
365 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
366 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
367 comparison.
368
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000369 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
370 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
371 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
372 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000373 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000374
375 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000376
377 and ::
378
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000379 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
380
381 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
382 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
383 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
384 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
385
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000386 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
387 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
388 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
389 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
390 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
391
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000392 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
393 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000394 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
395 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000396
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000397Library
398-------
399
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000400- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
401 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
402
403- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
404 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
405 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
406 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
407 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
408 See PEP 307 for details.
409
410- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
411 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
412
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000413- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
414 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000415 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000416 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
417 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000418 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000419
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000420- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
421 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
422
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000423- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
424 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
425 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
426
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000427- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
428
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000429- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
430 exception.
431
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000432- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
433 class.
434
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000435- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
436 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
437 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
438
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000439- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
440 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
441
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000442- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000443 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
444 See SF bug #659228.
445
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000446- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
447 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
448 See SF patch #651082.
449
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000450- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000451
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000452- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
453 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
454
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000455- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000456 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000457
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000458- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
459 DOS paths from other platforms.
460
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000461Tools/Demos
462-----------
463
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000464- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
465 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
466 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
467 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
468 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
469 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
470 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
471 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
472 example:
473
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000474 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
475 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000476
477 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
478
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000479
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000480Build
481-----
482
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000483- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
484 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
485 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000486 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
487
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000488 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
489
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000490- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
491 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
492 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
493 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
494 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
495 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
496 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
497 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
498 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
499
500- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
501 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
502 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
503 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
504
505- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
506 from the Tools/scripts directory.
507
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000508C API
509-----
510
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000511- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
512 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000513
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000514- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
515 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
516 tp_as_number pointer.
517
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000518- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
519 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
520 (SF #681367)
521
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000522- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
523 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
524 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
525 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000526
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000527Tests
528-----
529
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +0000530- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000531 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
532 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
533 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
534 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
535 pydoc.)
536
537- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
538
539- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000540
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000541Windows
542-------
543
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000544- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
545 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
546 time).
547
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000548- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
549 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
550
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000551- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
552 release without strong cryptography.
553
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000554- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000555 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000556
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000557- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
558 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
559
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000560Mac
561---
562
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000563- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
564 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000565
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000566- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
567 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
568 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000569
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000570- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
571 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000572
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000573- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
574 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
575 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
576 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000577
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000578- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000579 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
580 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
581 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000582
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000583
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000584What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000585=================================
586
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000587*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000588
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000589Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000590--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000591
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000592- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
593
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000594- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
595 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000596 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000597 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000598 a different meaning than before.
599
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000600- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000601 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000602 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000603
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000604- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000605 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000606 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000607
608- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
609 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
610 and deallocation.
611
612- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
613 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
614
615- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
616 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
617 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
618 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
619 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
620
621- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
622 now detected by the garbage collector.
623
624- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
625 [SF bug 519621]
626
627- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
628 identifier.
629
630- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
631 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
632 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
633 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
634 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
635 [SF bug 563060]
636
637- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
638 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
639 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
640 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
641 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
642
643- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
644 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
645 not called. [SF bug #537450]
646
647- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
648
649- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
650 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
651 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
652 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
653 state of the slots would be lost.)
654
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000655Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000656-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000657
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000658- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000659 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
660 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
661 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
662 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000663 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
664 Jython 2.1.
665
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000666- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000667 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000668 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
669 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
670 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
671 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
672 these, see PEP 302.
673
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000674- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
675 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
676 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
677
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000678- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
679 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
680 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
681
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000682- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
683 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
684 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
685
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000686- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
687 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
688 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
689 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
690 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
691 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
692 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
693 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
694 releases or implementations.
695
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000696- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000697 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
698 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000699
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000700- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
701 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
702
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000703- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
704 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
705 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
706
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000707- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
708 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
709
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000710- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
711 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000712 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
713 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000714
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000715- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
716 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
717 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
718 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
719 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
720
721 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
722 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
723 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
724 pattern.
725
726 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
727 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
728 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
729 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
730
731 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
732 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
733 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
734 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
735 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
736 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
737
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000738- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
739 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
740 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
741 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
742 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
743 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
744 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
745 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000746
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000747- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
748 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
749 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
750 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
751 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000752 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
753 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
754 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
755 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
756 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
757 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
758 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000759
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000760- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
761 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
762
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000763- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
764 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
765 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
766 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
767 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
768 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
769 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
770 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
771 to Zack Weinberg!
772
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000773- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
774 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
775 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
776 type. This has been fixed now.
777
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000778- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
779 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
780 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
781
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000782- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
783 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
784 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
785 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
786 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
787 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
788 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
789 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000790 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000791
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000792- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
793 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
794 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000795
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000796- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
797 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
798 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
799 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
800 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
801 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
802 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
803 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000804 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000805 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
806 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
807
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000808- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
809 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
810 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
811 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
812 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
813 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
814 this.)
815
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000816- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
817 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000818 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000819 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000820 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
821 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000822 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
823 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000824
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000825- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
826 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
827 currently running.
828
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000829- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
830 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
831 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
832 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
833
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000834- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
835 as directory names.
836
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000837- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
838 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
839
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000840- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
841 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
842
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000843- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000844 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
845 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000846
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000847- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
848 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
849 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
850 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
851 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
852
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000853- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
854 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
855 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
856 removed.
857
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000858- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
859 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
860 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
861
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000862- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
863 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
864 to __debug__.
865
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000866- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
867 string to the left with zeros. For example,
868 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
869
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000870- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
871 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
872 deprecated now.
873
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000874- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
875 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
876 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000877
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000878- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
879 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
880 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
881 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
882 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000883
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000884- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
885 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
886
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000887- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
888 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
889 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000890 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000891 is backward compatible.
892
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000893- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
894 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
895 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
896 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
897 could access a pointer to freed memory.
898
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000899- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
900 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
901 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
902 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
903 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
904 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000905
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000906- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
907 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
908
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000909- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
910 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
911
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000912- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
913 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
914 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
915 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
916 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
917
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000918- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
919 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
920 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
921
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000922- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000923 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
924
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000925- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
926 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
927 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000928
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000929- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
930 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
931
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000932- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
933 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
934 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
935
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +0000936- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
937
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000938Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000939-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000940
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +0000941- Added three operators to the operator module:
942 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
943 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
944 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
945
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000946- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
947
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000948- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
949 archives.
950
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000951- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
952 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
953 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
954
955 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
956
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000957- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
958 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
959 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000960 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000961
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000962- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
963 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
964 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
965 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000966 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
967 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
968 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
969 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000970
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000971- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
972 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000973
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000974- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
975
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000976- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
977 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
978
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000979- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
980 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
981 supported.
982
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000983- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
984
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000985- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
986 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000987
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000988- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
989 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
990
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000991- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
992
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000993- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
994 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
995
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000996- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
997 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
998 functions but callable type objects.
999
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001000- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001001 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001002 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001003
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001004- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1005 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001006
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001007- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1008 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001009
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001010- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1011 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1012 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1013 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1014
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001015- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1016 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001017
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001018- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1019 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1020 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1021 and __imul__.
1022
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001023- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001024 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1025 is called.
1026
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001027- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1028 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1029 interpreter was compiled.
1030
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001031- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1032 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1033 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001034 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001035 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1036 1, not 2.
1037
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001038- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1039 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1040 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1041 limit.
1042
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001043- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1044 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1045 bug #623464.
1046
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001047- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1048 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1049 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1050 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1051
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001052Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001053-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001054
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001055- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1056
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001057- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1058 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1059 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1060 with Python 2.3a2.
1061
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001062- os.path exposes getctime.
1063
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001064- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001065 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001066 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001067 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001068 unit tests of floating point results.
1069
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001070- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1071 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1072 has been increased.
1073
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001074- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1075 executed.
1076
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001077- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1078 postinstallation script.
1079
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001080- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1081 test the current module.
1082
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001083- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001084 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1085 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1086 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1087 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1088
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001089- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001090 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001091 Ward's Optik package.
1092
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001093- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1094 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1095 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1096 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1097
1098- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1099 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001100 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001101
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001102- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1103 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1104 shelf are binary pickles.
1105
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001106- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1107 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1108
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001109- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1110 modules are iterators now.
1111
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001112- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1113 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1114 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1115 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1116 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1117 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001118
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001119- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1120 with their entity value.
1121
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001122- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1123
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001124- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1125 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001126
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001127- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1128 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001129 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001130
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001131- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1132 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1133 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1134 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1135 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1136 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1137 main():
1138
1139 import locale
1140 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1141
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001142- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1143 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1144
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001145- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1146 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1147 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1148 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1149 to the new standard.
1150
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001151- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1152 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1153 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1154 an extension to the database.
1155
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001156- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1157 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1158 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1159 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001160 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001161
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001162- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001163 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001164
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001165- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1166 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1167 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1168 bounded integers.
1169
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001170- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1171 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1172 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1173 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1174 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1175 in existence.
1176
1177 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1178 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1179 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1180 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1181 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1182 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1183
1184 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1185 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1186 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1187 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1188
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001189- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1190 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1191 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1192
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001193- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1194
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001195- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1196 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1197 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1198 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1199
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001200- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1201 argument.
1202
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001203- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1204 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1205 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1206 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1207 [SF patch 560794].
1208
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001209- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1210 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1211 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001212 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1213 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1214 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001215
1216- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1217 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001218
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001219- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1220 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1221 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1222 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001223
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001224- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1225 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1226 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1227 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1228 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1229
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001230- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001231
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001232- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1233
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001234- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1235 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1236 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1237 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1238 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1239 identical to None.
1240
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001241- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1242 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1243 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1244 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1245 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1246 results now.
1247
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001248- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1249 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1250
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001251- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1252 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1253 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1254 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1255 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1256 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1257 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1258 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1259
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001260- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1261
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001262- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1263 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1264
1265- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1266 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1267 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1268 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1269 and other systems.
1270
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001271- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1272 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1273 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1274 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 +00001275 work well with these.
1276
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001277- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1278
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001279- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001280 connections.
1281
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001282- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1283 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1284 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1285
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001286- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1287 sets
1288
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001289- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1290 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1291 name.
1292
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001293- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1294 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1295 passed in.
1296
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001297- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001298 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001299 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1300 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001301
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001302- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1303
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001304- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1305
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001306- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1307 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1308 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1309
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001310- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1311 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1312 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1313 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001314 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001315
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001316- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001317 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001318 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001319
1320- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1321 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1322 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1323
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001324- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001325 the value of its expression argument.
1326
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001327- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1328 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1329 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1330
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001331- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1332 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1333 skipstone browser was included.
1334
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001335- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1336 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1337
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001338Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001339-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001340
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001341- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1342 names in addition to accepting file names.
1343
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001344- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1345 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1346 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1347 still used and useful.)
1348
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001349- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1350 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1351 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1352 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001353
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001354- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1355 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1356 the generated binary.
1357
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001358Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001359-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001360
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001361- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1362
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001363- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1364 except in the hands of experts.
1365
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001366- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001367 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1368 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1369 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001370
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001371- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1372 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1373 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1374 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1375 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1376 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1377 builds.
1378
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001379- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1380 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1381 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1382 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1383 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1384 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1385 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1386 new type.
1387
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001388- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001389
1390 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1391 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1392 positive infinities.
1393
1394 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1395 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1396 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1397 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1398 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1399 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1400 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1401
1402 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1403
1404 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1405
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001406- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1407 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1408 size of the executable.
1409
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001410- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1411 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1412 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1413 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001414
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001415- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1416
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001417- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1418 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1419 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001420
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001421- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1422 well as Unix.
1423
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001424- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1425 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1426 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1427 modules in the README file for details.
1428
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001429C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001430-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001431
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001432- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1433 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001434 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001435 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001436 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001437
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001438- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1439 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1440 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1441 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1442 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1443 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001444 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001445 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1446 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1447 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1448 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1449 aligned.)
1450
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001451- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1452 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1453 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1454
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001455- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1456 level.
1457
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001458- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1459 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1460 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1461 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1462 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1463
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001464- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1465 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1466 code.
1467
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001468- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1469 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1470 adjusting for negative indices.
1471
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001472- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1473 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1474 object.
1475
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001476- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1477 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1478 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1479
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001480- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1481 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001482
1483- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1484
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001485- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1486 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1487 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1488 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1489
1490- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1491
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001492- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001493
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001494- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001495 without going through the buffer API.
1496
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001497- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001498
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001499- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1500 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1501 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1502 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1503
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001504- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1505 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1506
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001507- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001508 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1509
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001510New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001511-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001512
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001513- OpenVMS is now supported.
1514
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001515- AtheOS is now supported.
1516
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001517- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1518
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001519- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1520
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001521Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001522-----
1523
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001524- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1525 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1526 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001527
1528Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001529-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001530
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001531- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1532 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1533 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1534 bugs.
1535 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001536 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001537 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1538 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001539 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001540
1541- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001542 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001543
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001544- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1545 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1546
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001547- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1548 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001549 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001550 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1551
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001552- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1553 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1554 use files" uninstall option).
1555
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001556- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1557
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001558- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1559 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1560
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001561- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1562 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1563 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1564
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001565- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1566 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1567 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1568 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1569 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001570 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1571 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1572 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001573
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001574- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001575 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001576 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1577 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1578 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1579 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1580 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1581 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1582 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1583 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1584 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1585 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1586 work around.
1587
1588- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1589 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1590 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1591 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1592 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1593 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1594 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1595 specified with O_CREAT too).
1596
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001597Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001598----
1599
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001600- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001601
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001602- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1603 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1604 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1605
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001606- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1607 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1608 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1609
1610- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1611 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1612 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1613 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1614 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1615 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1616 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1617 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001618
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001619- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1620 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1621 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001622
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001623- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1624 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1625 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1626 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1627 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001628
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001629- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1630 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1631 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001632
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001633- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1634 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001635
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001636- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1637 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1638 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1639 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1640 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001641
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001642- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1643 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1644 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1645
1646- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1647 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1648 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001649
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001650- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1651 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1652 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1653 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001654 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001655
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001656- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1657 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001658
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001659- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1660 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001661
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001662- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001663 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001664 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1665 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001666
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001667
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001668What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001669===============================
1670
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001671*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1672
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001673Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001674--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001675
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001676- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1677 with a custom metaclass.
1678
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001679Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001680-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001681
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001682- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1683 are proxies.
1684
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001685Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001686-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001687
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001688- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1689 very short strings.
1690
1691- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1692 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1693 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1694 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1695 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1696
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001697Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001698-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001699
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001700- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1701 close or delete time).
1702
1703- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1704 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1705
1706- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1707
1708- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001709 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001710
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001711Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001712-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001713
1714Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001715-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001716
1717C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001718-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001719
1720New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001721-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001722
1723Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001724-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001725
1726Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001727-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001728
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001729- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1730
1731- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1732 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1733
1734- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1735 deleted at process exit time.
1736
1737- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1738 in backslash.
1739
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001740Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001741----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001742
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001743- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1744 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1745 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1746
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001747
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001748What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001749===========================
1750
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001751*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1752
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001753Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001754--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001755
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001756- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1757 been extensively updated. See
1758
1759 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1760
1761 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1762
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001763- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1764 deleted!
1765
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001766- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1767 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1768 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1769 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1770 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1771
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001772- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1773
1774 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1775 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1776
1777 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1778 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1779 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1780 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1781 supported anyway.
1782
1783 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1784 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1785
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001786- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1787 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1788 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1789 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1790 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001791
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001792- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1793 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1794 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1795
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001796Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001797-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001798
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001799- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1800 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1801 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1802 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1803 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1804 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001805 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1806 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1807 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1808 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001809
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001810- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1811 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1812 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1813
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001814Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001815-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001816
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001817- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1818
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001819Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001820-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001821
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001822- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1823 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1824 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1825 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1826 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1827 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1828
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001829- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1830
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001831- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1832
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001833- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1834
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001835- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1836 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1837 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1838
1839- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1840
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001841Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001842-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001843
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001844- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1845 off a search on Google.
1846
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001847Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001848-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001849
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001850- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1851 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1852 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1853 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1854 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1855 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1856 other platforms should do likewise.
1857
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001858- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1859 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1860 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1861
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001862C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001863-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001864
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001865- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1866 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1867 producing key-value pairs.
1868
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001869- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001870 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001871 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1872 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1873 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1874 previously went unchallenged.
1875
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001876New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001877-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001878
1879Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001880-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001881
1882Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001883-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001884
1885Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001886----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001887
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001888- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1889 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001890
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001891- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1892 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1893 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1894 home.
1895
1896
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001897What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001898===========================
1899
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001900*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1901
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001902Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001903--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001904
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001905- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1906 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001907
1908 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001909 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001910
1911 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1912 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001913 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001914 This needs to be documented.
1915
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001916- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1917 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1918
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001919- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1920 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1921 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1922
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001923- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1924 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1925
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001926- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1927 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1928 class forbids it).
1929
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001930- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1931 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1932 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1933
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001934- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1935
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001936Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001937-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001938
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001939- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1940 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001941 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001942
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001943- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1944 (like 1 + '').
1945
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001946Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001947-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001948
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001949- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1950 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1951 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1952 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001953 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001954 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1955
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001956- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1957 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1958 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1959 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1960
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001961- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1962 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001963 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1964 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1965 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001966
1967- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1968 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001969
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001970- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1971 bytes on its input.
1972
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001973Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001974-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001975
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001976- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001977 convenience function.
1978
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001979- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1980 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1981 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001982 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1983 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1984 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1985 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1986 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1987 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001988
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001989- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1990 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1991 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1992 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1993
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001994- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1995 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1996 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1997
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001998- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1999 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2000 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2001 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2002
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002003- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2004 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002005 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002006 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2007 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2008 new -l and -e options.
2009
2010- statcache is now deprecated.
2011
2012- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2013 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002014 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002015 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2016 time properly taken into account.
2017
2018- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2019 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2020 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2021 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2022
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002023Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002024-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002025
2026Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002027-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002028
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002029- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2030 is built with libdb3 if available.
2031
2032- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2033
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002034C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002035-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002036
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002037- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2038 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2039 PySequence_Size().
2040
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002041- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2042
2043- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2044 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2045 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2046
2047- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2048 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2049
2050- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2051 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2052
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002053New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002054-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002055
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002056- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2057 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2058
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002059- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2060 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2061
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002062- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2063
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002064Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002065-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002066
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002067- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2068 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2069
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002070Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002071-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002072
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002073Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002074----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002075
2076- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2077 removed completely in the next release.
2078
2079- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2080 OSX.
2081
2082- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2083 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2084
2085- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2086
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002087
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002088What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002089===========================
2090
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002091*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2092
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002093Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002094--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002095
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002096- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002097 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002098 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002099 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2100 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002101 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2102 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002103 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2104 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002105
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002106- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2107 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2108
2109- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2110 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2111
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002112Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002113-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002114
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002115- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2116 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2117 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2118 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2119 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2120 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2121 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2122 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2123
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002124- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2125 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2126 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2127 example).
2128
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002129- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002130 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002131 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002132 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002133
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002134- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2135 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2136 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002137 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002138
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002139- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2140 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2141 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2142 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2143 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2144 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2145
2146 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2147
2148 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2149
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002150Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002151-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002152
2153- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2154
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002155- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2156
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002157- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2158 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002159
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002160- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2161 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2162 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2163 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2164 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2165 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002166 attributes.
2167
2168- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2169 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2170 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002171
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002172- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2173 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2174 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002175
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002176- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2177 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2178 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002179 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2180 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2181
2182- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2183 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002184
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002185Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002186-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002187
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002188- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2189 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2190
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002191- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2192 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2193 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2194 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2195
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002196- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2197 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2198 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2199 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2200
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002201 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2202 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2203 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2204 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2205 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2206 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2207 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2208 without losing information).
2209
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002210- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002211 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2212 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2213 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2214 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2215 module).
2216
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002217 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002218 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2219 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2220 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2221 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002222
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002223- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002224 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2225 encoding.
2226
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002227- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2228 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2229
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002230- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002231 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2232
2233- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2234 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2235 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2236 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2237
2238- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2239
2240- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2241 ON, and OFF.
2242
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002243- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2244 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2245
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002246Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002247-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002248
2249- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2250 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2251 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002252
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002253- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2254 been added: -X and -E.
2255
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002256Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002257-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002258
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002259- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2260 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2261
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002262C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002263-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002264
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002265- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2266 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2267 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2268 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2269 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2270
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002271- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2272 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2273 as long) arguments.
2274
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002275- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2276 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2277 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2278 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2279 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2280 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2281
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002282- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2283 input.
2284
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002285New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002286-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002287
2288Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002289-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002290
2291Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002292-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002293
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002294- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2295 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2296 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2297
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002298- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2299 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2300 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002301 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002302
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002303 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2304 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2305 import signal
2306 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002307
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002308 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002309 while 1:
2310 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002311 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002312 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2313 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2314 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2315 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002316
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002317
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002318What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2319===========================
2320
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002321*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2322
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002323Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002324--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002325
2326- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2327 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2328 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2329
2330- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2331 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2332 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2333 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2334 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2335 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2336 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002337
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002338- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002339 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002340 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2341 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2342 associate a docstring with a property.
2343
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002344- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2345 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2346 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2347 other built-in object types.
2348
2349- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2350 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2351 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2352 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2353 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2354
2355- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2356 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2357
2358- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2359 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002360 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002361 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2362 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2363 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2364 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2365 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2366
2367- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2368 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2369 class.
2370
2371- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2372 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2373 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2374 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2375
2376- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2377 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2378 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2379 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2380
2381- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2382 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2383
2384- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2385 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2386 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2387 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2388 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002389 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002390 with the same value as s.
2391
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002392- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2393
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002394Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002395----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002396
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002397- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2398
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002399- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2400 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2401 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2402 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2403 objects.
2404
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002405- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2406 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002407 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2408 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2409
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002410- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2411 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2412 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2413
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002414Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002415-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002416
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002417- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2418 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2419 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2420 by the instances.
2421
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002422- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2423 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2424 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2425
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002426- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2427 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2428 before the entire comparison is complete.
2429
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002430- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2431 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2432 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2433
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002434- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2435 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2436 getwriter().
2437
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002438- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2439 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2440
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002441- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002442 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2443 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2444
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002445- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2446 iterable object.
2447
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002448- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2449 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002450
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002451- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2452 authentication.
2453
2454- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2455 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002456
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002457- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002458 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2459 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2460 a sample driver.)
2461
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002462Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002463-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002464
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002465- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2466 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2467 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2468 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2469 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2470 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2471 kernel has large file support.
2472
2473- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2474 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2475 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2476 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2477 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2478
2479- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2480 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2481 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2482
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002483C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002484-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002485
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002486- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2487 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2488
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002489New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002490-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002491
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002492- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2493 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2494
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002495Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002496-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002497
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002498- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2499 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2500 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2501 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2502 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2503
2504- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2505 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2506 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2507 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2508
2509- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2510 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2511
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002512Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002513-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002514
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002515- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002516 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2517 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002518
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002519
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002520What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2521===========================
2522
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002523*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2524
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002525Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002526----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002527
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002528- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2529 big to represent as a C double.
2530
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002531- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2532 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2533 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2534 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2535 restriction).
2536
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002537- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2538 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2539 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2540 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2541 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2542
2543 >>> dir([])
2544 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2545 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2546 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2547 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2548 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2549 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2550 'reverse', 'sort']
2551
2552 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2553
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002554- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002555 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2556 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2557 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2558 OverflowError exception.
2559
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002560- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002561 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002562 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2563 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2564 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2565 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2566 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002567 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002568 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2569 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2570
2571 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2572 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2573 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2574 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002575
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002576- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002577 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2578 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2579 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2580 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2581 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2582 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2583 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2584 once it is created.
2585
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002586- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2587 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2588 (key, value) pairs.
2589
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002590- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002591 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2592 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2593
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002594- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2595 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2596 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2597 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2598 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002599
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002600- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002601 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2602 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2603
2604 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2605
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002606- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002607 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2608
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002609Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002610-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002611
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002612- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002613 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2614 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002615
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002616- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2617 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2618 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2619 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2620 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2621 in this area anymore).
2622
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002623- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2624 threading.Timer.
2625
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002626- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2627 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2628
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002629- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002630 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2631
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002632- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002633 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2634 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2635 converted to Python longs.
2636
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002637- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002638 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2639
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002640- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2641 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2642 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2643
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002644Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002645-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002646
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002647- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2648 division operators as per PEP 238.
2649
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002650Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002651-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002652
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002653- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2654 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2655 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2656 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2657
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002658C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002659-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002660
2661- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002662
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002663- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2664 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002665 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002666
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002667 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2668 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002669 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002670 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002671
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002672- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002673 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2674 module:
2675
2676 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002677
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002678 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2679 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002680
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002681 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2682 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002683
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002684 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2685
2686 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2687
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002688- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002689 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2690 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2691 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002692
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002693New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002694-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002695
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002696- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2697 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2698 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2699 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2700 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002701
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002702Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002703-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002704
2705Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002706-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002707
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002708- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2709 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2710 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2711 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002712 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2713 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2714 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2715 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2716 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002717
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002718- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002719 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2720
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002721
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002722What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2723===========================
2724
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002725*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2726
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002727Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002728-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002729
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002730- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2731 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2732
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002733- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2734 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2735 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002736
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002737- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2738 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2739 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2740 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002741
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002742- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2743
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002744- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002745
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002746Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002747-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002748
2749- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002750 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002751 the module docstring for details.
2752
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002753Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002754-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002755
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002756- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002757 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2758 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2759 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002760
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002761- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2762 Nick Mathewson.
2763
2764Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002765----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002766
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002767- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2768 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2769 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2770 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2771 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2772 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2773 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2774 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2775
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002776- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2777 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2778 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2779 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2780
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002781- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2782 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2783 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2784 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2785 come a long way).
2786
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002787- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2788 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2789 write filters for these warnings).
2790
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002791- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2792 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2793 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2794 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2795 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2796
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002797- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2798 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2799 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2800 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2801 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2802 older distribution.
2803
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002804Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002805-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002806
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002807- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2808 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002809 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002810
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002811- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2812 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2813 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2814
2815- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2816
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002817- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2818
2819- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2820
2821- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2822
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002823- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002824
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002825- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2826
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002827New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002828-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002829
2830C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002831-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002832
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002833- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2834 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2835 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2836 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2837 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2838 against buffer overruns.
2839
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002840- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002841 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2842 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002843 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2844 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2845 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2846
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002847- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2848 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2849 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2850 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2851 deprecated.
2852
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002853Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002854-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002855
2856- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2857 relevant is found.
2858
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002859
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002860What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002861===========================
2862
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002863*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2864
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002865Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002866----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002867
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002868- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2869 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2870 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2871 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2872 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2873 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2874 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2875 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002876 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002877 repaired.
2878
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002879- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002880 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002881 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2882 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2883 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2884 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2885 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2886 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2887 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2888 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2889
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002890- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2891 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2892 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2893 leading BMO character).
2894
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002895- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2896 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2897 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2898
2899 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2900 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2901 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002902
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002903 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2904 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2905 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2906 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2907 for various simple to use conversions.
2908
2909 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2910 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2911
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002912 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2913 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2914 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2915 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2916 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2917 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2918 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2919 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2920 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2921 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2922 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2923 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2924 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2925 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2926 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002927
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002928- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2929 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2930 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002931 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002932 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002933
2934 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002935 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2936 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2937 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2938 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2939 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002940 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2941 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002942
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002943 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2944 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2945 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002946 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002947
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002948- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2949 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2950 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2951 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2952 floating arithmetic,
2953
2954 x = 9007199254740992.0
2955 print long(x)
2956
2957 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2958 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2959 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2960 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2961 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2962 functions are of good quality).
2963
2964 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2965 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2966 algorithms to break.
2967
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002968- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2969 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2970 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2971 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2972 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2973 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2974 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2975 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2976 order.
2977
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002978- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2979 operation along the most common code paths.
2980
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002981- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2982 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2983
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002984- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2985 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2986 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2987 {}.update(UserDict())
2988
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002989- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2990 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2991 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2992 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2993 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2994 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2995 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2996 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2997
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002998- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002999 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003000
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003001 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003002 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3003 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003004 join() method of strings
3005 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003006 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3007 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003008 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003009 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003010
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003011- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3012 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3013
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003014- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3015 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3016
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003017- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3018 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3019 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3020 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3021
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003022- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3023 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003024 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003025 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3026 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003027
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003028- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3029
3030
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003031Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003032-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003033
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003034- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003035 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003036 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3037 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3038
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003039- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3040 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3041
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003042- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3043 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3044 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3045 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3046
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003047- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3048 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3049 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3050
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003051- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3052
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003053- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3054
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003055- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3056 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3057 that are still imported into string.py).
3058
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003059- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3060
3061- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3062 Now it does.
3063
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003064- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3065
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003066- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3067 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3068 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3069 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3070 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003071 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3072 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003073
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003074- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3075 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3076 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3077 'help(object)'.
3078
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003079Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003080-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003081
3082- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003083 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003084 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3085 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3086
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003087- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003088 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3089 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003090
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003091C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003092-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003093
3094- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3095 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003096
3097----
3098
3099**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**