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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +000015- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
16 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
17
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +000018- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
19 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
20 modified the list.
21
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +000022- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
23 functions is now writable.
24
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +000025- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
26 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
27 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
28 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
29
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000030- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
31 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
32 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
33 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
34 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000035
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +000036- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
37 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
38
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000039Extension modules
40-----------------
41
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +000042- Added socket.socketpair().
43
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000044Library
45-------
46
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +000047- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
48 to the readline module.
49
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +000050- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +000051 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
52 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +000053
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +000054- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
55 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
56 contains symlinks.
57
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +000058- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
59 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
60
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +000061- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
62 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
63 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
64
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000065- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
66 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
67 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
68 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
69 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
70 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
71 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
72 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
73 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
74 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
75 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
76 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
77 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
78
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +000079- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
80
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000081Tools/Demos
82-----------
83
84Build
85-----
86
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +000087- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
88 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
89
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +000090- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
91 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
92
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000093C API
94-----
95
96Documentation
97-------------
98
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +000099- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if it contains
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000100symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment since 1992, but is now in
101the library reference as well.
102
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000103New platforms
104-------------
105
106Tests
107-----
108
109Windows
110-------
111
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000112- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
113 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
114 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
115 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
116 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
117 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
118 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
119 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
120 the problem.
121
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000122Mac
123---
124
125
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000126What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
127=================================
128
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000129*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000130
131Core and builtins
132-----------------
133
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000134- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
135 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
136 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
137 sensitive code.
138
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000139- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
140 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
141 @staticmethod
142 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000143 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000144
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000145- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
146 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
147 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
148 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
149 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
150 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
151 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
152 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
153 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
154 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
155 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
156
157 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
158 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
159 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
160 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
161 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
162 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
163 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
164
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000165- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
166 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
167
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000168- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000169 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000170
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000171- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000172 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000173 which was missing for no apparent reason.
174
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000175- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000176 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
177 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
178
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000179- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
180 types that support garbage collection.
181
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000182- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
183
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000184- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
185 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
186 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
187 Jython.
188
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000189- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
190
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000191- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
192 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
193
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000194- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
195 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
196 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000197
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000198- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
199 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
200 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
201
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000202Extension modules
203-----------------
204
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000205- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
206
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000207Library
208-------
209
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000210- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
211 TIS-620
212
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000213- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
214 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
215 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
216 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
217 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
218 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
219 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
220 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
221 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
222 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
223
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000224- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
225
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000226- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
227 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
228 same as when the argument is omitted).
229 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
230
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000231- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
232
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000233- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
234 schemes are offered.
235
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000236- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
237
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000238- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
239 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
240 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
241
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000242- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
243
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000244- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
245 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
246
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000247- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
248 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
249 when dummy_threading is being used.
250
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000251- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
252 from a tarfile.
253
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000254- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000255 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000256
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000257- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
258 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
259 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
260 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
261
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000262- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
263 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
264
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000265- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
266 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
267 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
268 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
269 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
270 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
271 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
272 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
273 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
274 by some other method in progress).
275
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000276- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
277 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
278 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000279
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000280- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
281
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000282- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
283 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
284 AM Kuchling.
285
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000286- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
287 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
288 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
289
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000290- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
291 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
292 instead of unsigned.
293
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000294- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000295 no longer part of the public API.
296
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000297- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
298 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
299 string methods of the same name).
300
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000301- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000302 SF patch 945642.
303
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000304- doctest unittest integration improvements:
305
306 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
307
308 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
309 DocTestSuites.
310
311- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
312 that provide thread-local data.
313
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000314- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
315 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
316
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000317- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
318
319- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
320 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
321 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
322
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000323- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
324
325 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
326 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
327 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000328
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000329 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
330 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
331 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
332 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
333
334 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
335 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
336
337 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
338 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
339 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
340 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
341
342 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
343 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
344 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
345 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
346 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
347
348 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
349 wrapping help output.
350
351 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
352 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
353 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000354
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000355C API
356-----
357
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000358- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
359 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
360 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
361 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
362 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
363 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
364 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
365 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
366 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
367 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
368 its visible semantics have not changed.
369
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000370- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
371 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
372
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000373Documentation
374-------------
375
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000376- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000377
378 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000379 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000380
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000381 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000382
383 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
384
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000385- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000386
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000387Tests
388-----
389
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000390- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000391 platforms that use the Makefile.
392
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000393- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
394 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
395 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
396
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000397
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000398What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
399=================================
400
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000401*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000402
403Core and builtins
404-----------------
405
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000406- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
407 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
408 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
409 objects now (one object instead of three).
410
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000411- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
412 Windows DLLs.
413
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000414- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
415 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000416
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000417- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
418 a new .pyc magic.
419
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000420- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
421 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
422 be there.
423
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000424- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
425 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
426 the LC_NUMERIC category.
427
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000428- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
429 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
430 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
431
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000432- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
433
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000434- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
435 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
436 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000437
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000438- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
439 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
440
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000441- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
442
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000443- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000444 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000445
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000446- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
447
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000448- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
449
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000450- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
451 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
452
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000453- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
454 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
455 Fixes bug #858016 .
456
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000457- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
458 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
459 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
460
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000461- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
462 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
463 improves their performance (about 35%).
464
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000465- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
466 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
467 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
468
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000469- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
470 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
471 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
472 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
473
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000474- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
475 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
476 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
477 length is not known).
478
479- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
480 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000481 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
482 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000483 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
484
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000485- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
486 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
487
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000488- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
489 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
490 keyword arguments.
491
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000492- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
493 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
494 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
495
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000496- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
497 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
498 cases.
499
500- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
501 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
502 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
503 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
504 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
505 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
506 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
507 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
508 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
509 a release build.
510
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000511- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
512 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
513
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000514- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000515 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000516
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000517- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
518 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
519 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
520 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
521 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
522 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
523 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
524 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
525 destroyed.
526
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000527- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
528 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
529 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
530 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
531 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
532 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
533 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
534 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
535
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000536- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
537 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
538 character other than a space.
539
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000540- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
541 by the function object or by the method object, the function
542 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
543 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
544 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
545 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
546 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
547 attributes with the same name.
548
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000549- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
550 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
551 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
552 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
553 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
554 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
555 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
556 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
557 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
558 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
559 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
560 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
561 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
562 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000563
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000564- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
565 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
566 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
567 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
568 This has been repaired.
569
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000570- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
571
572- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
573
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000574- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
575 over a sequence.
576
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000577- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000578 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000579
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000580- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
581
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000582- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
583 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
584 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
585 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
586 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
587 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
588 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
589 records with equal keys is unchanged).
590
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000591- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
592 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
593 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
594
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000595- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
596 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
597 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
598 freelist.
599
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000600- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
601 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
602
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000603- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
604 number.
605
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000606- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
607 a TypeError exception.
608
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000609- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
610 820195.
611
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000612- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
613 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
614 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
615
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000616- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000617 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
618 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000619
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000620- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
621 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
622 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
623
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000624- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
625 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000626 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000627
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000628- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000629 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
630 the first call.
631
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000632
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000633Extension modules
634-----------------
635
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000636- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
637 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
638
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000639- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
640 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
641 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
642 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
643 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
644 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
645 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000646
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000647- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
648
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000649- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
650
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000651- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
652 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
653
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000654- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
655 fewer false positives.
656
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000657- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
658 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
659
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000660- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000661 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
662
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000663- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000664 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000665 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
666 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
667 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000668
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000669- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
670 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
671 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
672 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
673
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000674- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
675 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
676 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
677 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
678 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
679 #897625.
680
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000681- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
682 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
683
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000684- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
685 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
686 and pops on either side of the deque.
687
688- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
689 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
690
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000691- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
692 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
693 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
694 other functions that expect a function argument.
695
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000696- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
697
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000698- os.getsid was added.
699
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000700- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
701 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
702 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
703
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000704- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
705
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000706- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
707
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000708- readline.clear_history was added.
709
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000710- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
711
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000712- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
713
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000714- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
715
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000716- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
717
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000718- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
719
720- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
721
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000722- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
723
724- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
725
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000726- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
727 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
728 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
729
730- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
731 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
732 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
733 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
734 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
735 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
736 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
737
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000738- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
739 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
740 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
741 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000742
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000743- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000744 iterators from a single iterable.
745
746- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
747 of raising a TypeError exception.
748
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000749- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
750 as parameter.
751
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000752Library
753-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000754
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000755- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
756 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
757 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000758
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000759- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
760 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
761 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000762
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000763- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000764
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000765- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
766 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000767
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000768- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
769 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
770
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000771- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
772
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000773- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000774 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000775
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000776- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
777 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
778
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000779- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
780
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000781- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
782 on cygwin and mingw32.
783
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000784- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
785
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000786- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
787 module.
788
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000789- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
790 installation scheme for all platforms.
791
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000792- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000793 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000794
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000795- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
796 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
797 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
798
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000799- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
800 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
801 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
802
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000803- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
804
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000805- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
806
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000807- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
808 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
809
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000810- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
811 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
812 type pattern with the same value exists.
813
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000814- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
815 when run from the command prompt).
816
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000817- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
818 not taken into consideration when caching value.
819
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000820- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
821 default sort).
822
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000823- Added global runctx function to profile module
824
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000825- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
826
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000827- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
828
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000829- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
830
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000831- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000832 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
833 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
834 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
835 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
836 accordingly.
837
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000838- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
839 decoding standards.
840
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000841- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
842 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
843 called for all requests.
844
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000845- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
846 they are passed to the compiler.
847
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000848- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
849 indent, width and depth.
850
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000851- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
852 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
853
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000854- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
855 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
856
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000857- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
858
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000859- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
860
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000861- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
862
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000863- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
864 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
865
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000866- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000867 for better performance.
868
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000869- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000870
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000871- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
872 a string).
873
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000874- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
875
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000876- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
877
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000878- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
879
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000880- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
881
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000882- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
883 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
884 list of fieldnames.
885
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000886- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
887 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
888
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000889- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
890
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000891- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
892 empty lists.
893
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000894- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
895 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
896 and shelves.
897
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000898- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
899 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
900
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000901- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000902 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
903 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000904
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000905- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
906 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000907 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000908
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000909- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000910 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
911 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
912
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000913- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
914 and removed in Py2.4.
915
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000916- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
917
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000918- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
919
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000920Tools/Demos
921-----------
922
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000923- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
924 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
925
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000926- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
927
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000928- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
929 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
930 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
931 destination in situations where both files are given.
932
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000933- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
934 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
935 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
936 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
937
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000938- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
939
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000940- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
941 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
942 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
943 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
944 now.
945
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000946- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
947 in effect
948
949- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
950 C-c C-h
951
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000952- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
953 -d option was given.
954
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000955Build
956-----
957
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000958- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
959 build under OS X.
960
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000961- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
962 --enable-profiling.
963
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000964- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
965 is configured --with-tsc.
966
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000967- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
968 on AMD64.
969
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000970- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
971 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
972
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000973- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
974 removed.
975
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000976- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
977 supported (see PEP 11).
978
979- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
980
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000981- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
982
983- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
984 (see PEP 11).
985
986- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
987 sizeof(char) must be 1.
988
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000989C API
990-----
991
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000992- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
993 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
994 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
995
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000996- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
997 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
998 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
999 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1000
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001001- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1002 generator objects.
1003
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001004- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1005 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001006 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1007 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001008
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001009- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1010 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1011
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001012- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1013 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1014 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1015 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1016 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1017
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001018- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1019 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1020 about 10% faster.
1021
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001022- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1023 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1024
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001025- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1026 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1027 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1028 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1029
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001030Windows
1031-------
1032
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001033- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1034 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1035 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1036 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1037
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001038- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1039 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1040 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1041
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001042
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001043What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1044===============================
1045
1046*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1047
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001048IDLE
1049----
1050
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001051- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1052 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1053 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1054 context-menu actions.
1055
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001056- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1057 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1058 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1059 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1060 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1061 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1062 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1063 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1064 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1065
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001066
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001067What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1068=============================================
1069
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001070*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001071
1072Core and builtins
1073-----------------
1074
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001075- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001076 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001077 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1078
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001079Extension modules
1080-----------------
1081
1082- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1083 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1084 than once. This has been fixed.
1085
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001086- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1087 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1088 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1089 call.
1090
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001091- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1092
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001093Library
1094-------
1095
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001096- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1097 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1098
1099- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1100 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1101 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1102 restored.
1103
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001104IDLE
1105----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001106
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001107- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001108
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001109Build
1110-----
1111
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001112- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1113 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1114
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001115C API
1116-----
1117
1118Windows
1119-------
1120
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001121- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1122 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1123
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001124- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1125
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001126Mac
1127---
1128
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001129- Various fixes to pimp.
1130
1131- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1132
1133- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1134 more problems than it solves.
1135
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001136
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001137What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1138=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001139
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001140*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1141
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001142Core and builtins
1143-----------------
1144
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001145- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1146 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1147
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001148- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1149 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001150 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001151
1152- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1153 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1154 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001155 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001156
1157- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1158 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001159
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001160- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1161 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1162 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1163
1164- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001165 770247.
1166
1167- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001168
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001169Extension modules
1170-----------------
1171
1172- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1173 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1174
1175- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1176
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001177- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1178
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001179- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1180 contained within the _strptime module.
1181
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001182- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1183 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1184
1185- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001186 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1187
1188- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1189 the find_class attribute, if present.
1190
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001191- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001192
1193 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1194 (SF bug 763298).
1195
1196 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001197 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1198 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1199 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001200
1201 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1202
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001203Library
1204-------
1205
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001206- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1207
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001208- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1209 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1210 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1211 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1212 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1213 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1214 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1215 or Tester().
1216
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001217- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1218 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1219 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1220 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1221 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1222 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1223 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1224 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1225 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001226
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001227 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001228
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001229- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1230 weren't before was an oversight.
1231
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001232- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1233 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1234
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001235- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1236 when there are no lines.
1237
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001238- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1239 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1240
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001241- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1242 to child processes.
1243
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001244- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1245
1246- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1247
1248- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1249 xmlrpclib.
1250
1251- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1252 responses.
1253
1254- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1255 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1256
1257- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1258 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1259 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1260
1261- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1262 used as patterns.
1263
1264- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1265 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1266 than Tk 8.3.
1267
1268- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1269
1270- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001271
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001272Tools/Demos
1273-----------
1274
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001275- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1276
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001277- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1278
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001279- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001280
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001281Build
1282-----
1283
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001284- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1285
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001286- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1287
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001288- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1289 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001290
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001291- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1292 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1293 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001294
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001295C API
1296-----
1297
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001298- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1299 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1300
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001301Windows
1302-------
1303
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001304- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1305 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1306 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1307 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1308 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1309 Python exception ::
1310
1311 thread.error: can't start new thread
1312
1313 is raised now.
1314
1315- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1316 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1317 instead of from DLL teardown.
1318
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001319Mac
1320---
1321
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001322- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001323 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001324 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1325 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1326 the executable in the bundle.
1327
1328- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001329
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001330- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1331
1332- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1333 on Panther.
1334
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001335What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1336================================
1337
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001338*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001339
1340Core and builtins
1341-----------------
1342
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001343- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1344 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1345 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1346 with the -i option.
1347
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001348- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1349 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1350
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001351- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1352 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1353
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001354- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1355 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1356 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1357 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1358 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1359 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1360 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1361 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1362 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1363 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1364 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1365 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1366 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001367
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001368- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1369 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1370 embedded in a lambda expression.
1371
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001372- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1373 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1374 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1375 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1376 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1377
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001378- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1379 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1380 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1381
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001382- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1383 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1384
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001385- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1386 It's writable again.
1387
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001388- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1389 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1390 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001391 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001392
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001393- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1394 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1395 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1396
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001397Extension modules
1398-----------------
1399
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001400- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1401 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1402
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001403- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1404 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1405 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1406 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1407
1408- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1409 collection.
1410
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001411- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1412 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1413 unique within a single program run.
1414
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001415- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1416 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1417
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001418- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1419 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1420
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001421- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1422 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001423
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001424- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1425
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001426- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1427 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1428
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001429- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1430 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1431 for many BSD-derived systems.
1432
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001433
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001434Library
1435-------
1436
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001437- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1438 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1439 primary ones:
1440
1441 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1442 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1443 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1444
1445 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1446 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1447 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1448 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1449 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1450 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1451
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001452- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1453 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1454 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1455 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1456 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1457 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1458 argument.
1459
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001460- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1461 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1462 in the archive.
1463
1464- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1465 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1466
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001467- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1468 569574).
1469
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001470- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1471 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1472 no more.
1473
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001474- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1475 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1476 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1477 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1478 code coverage.
1479
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001480- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1481 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1482 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001483 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1484 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001485
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001486- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1487 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1488 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001489 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001490
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001491- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1492
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001493- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1494 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1495 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1496 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1497
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001498- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1499 handling.
1500
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001501- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1502 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1503
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001504- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1505 in socket.py.
1506
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001507- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1508
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001509- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1510 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1511 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1512 opener with proxy support.
1513
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001514- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1515
1516- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1517
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001518Tools/Demos
1519-----------
1520
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001521- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1522
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001523- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1524
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001525- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1526 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001527
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001528- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1529 files.
1530
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001531Build
1532-----
1533
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001534- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001535 different root directory.
1536
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001537C API
1538-----
1539
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001540- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1541 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1542 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1543 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1544 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1545 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1546 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1547 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1548 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1549 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1550
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001551- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1552 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1553 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1554 from Python.
1555
1556
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001557New platforms
1558-------------
1559
1560None this time.
1561
1562Tests
1563-----
1564
1565- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1566 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1567
1568Windows
1569-------
1570
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001571- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1572
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001573- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1574 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1575 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1576 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1577 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1578 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1579 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1580 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1581 that's what it's for.
1582
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001583Mac
1584---
1585
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001586- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1587 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1588 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1589 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001590- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1591 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1592- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001593
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001594SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1595------------------------------------
1596
1597430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1598598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1599622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1600661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1601683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1602697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1603713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1604724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1605727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1606729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1607730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1608731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1609732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1610733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1611735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1612740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1613744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1614745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1615747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1616749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1617751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1618753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1619755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1620757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1621760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1622
1623
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001624What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1625================================
1626
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001627*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001628
1629Core and builtins
1630-----------------
1631
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001632- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1633 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1634
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001635- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1636 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1637 and cannot be strings).
1638
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001639- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1640 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1641 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1642 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1643
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001644- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1645 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1646 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1647 Python itself.
1648
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001649- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1650 the referenced object, if it has one.
1651
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001652- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1653 the thread started at
1654 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1655
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001656- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1657 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1658 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1659 placed on a list index.
1660
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001661- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1662 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1663 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1664 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1665
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001666- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1667 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1668 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1669 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1670 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1671 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1672 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1673
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001674- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1675 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1676 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1677 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1678 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1679
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001680- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1681 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001682
1683- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1684 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1685 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1686 #693195.)
1687
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001688- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1689 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001690
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001691- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001692 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001693 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1694 interpreter executions, would fail.
1695
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001696- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001697 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001698 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001699
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001700Extension modules
1701-----------------
1702
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001703- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1704 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1705 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1706 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1707
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001708- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1709 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1710
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001711- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1712 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1713 and Greg Chapman.)
1714
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001715- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1716 recursively.
1717
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001718- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001719 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1720 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1721 leaks.
1722
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001723- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1724
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001725- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1726 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1727 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1728 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1729 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1730 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1731 #705836.
1732
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001733- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001734 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1735
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001736- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1737 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1738 See SF bug #692416.
1739
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001740- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1741 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1742
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001743- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1744 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1745 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001746
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001747- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001748 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1749 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1750
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001751- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1752 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1753 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1754 timeouts to work properly.
1755
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001756Library
1757-------
1758
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001759- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1760 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1761 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1762 future release.
1763
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001764- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1765 for querying platform dependent features.
1766
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001767- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001768
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001769- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1770 pickle protocol versions.
1771
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001772- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1773 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1774 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1775
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001776- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1777
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001778- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1779 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1780 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1781 modules.
1782
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001783- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1784 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1785 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1786
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001787- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1788 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1789
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001790- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1791 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1792 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1793
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001794- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001795 MS Office extensions.
1796
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001797- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1798 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1799
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001800- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1801 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1802
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001803- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1804 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1805 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1806 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1807 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1808 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1809
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001810- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1811 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1812 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001813
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001814- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1815 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1816 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1817
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001818- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1819
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001820- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1821 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1822 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1823
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001824Tools/Demos
1825-----------
1826
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001827- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1828 See the module docstring for details.
1829
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001830Build
1831-----
1832
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001833- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1834 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001835
1836C API
1837-----
1838
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001839- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1840
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001841- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1842 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1843 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1844
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001845- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1846 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001847
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001848 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1849 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1850 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001851
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001852- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001853 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1854
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001855- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1856 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1857 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001858
1859New platforms
1860-------------
1861
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001862None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001863
1864Tests
1865-----
1866
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001867- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1868 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001869
1870Windows
1871-------
1872
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001873- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1874 function.
1875
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001876- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1877 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001878
1879Mac
1880---
1881
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001882- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1883 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001884
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001885- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1886 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001887
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001888- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1889 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1890 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001891
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001892- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001893 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1894 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001895
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001896- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1897 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001898
1899
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001900What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1901=================================
1902
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001903*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001904
1905Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001906-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001907
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001908- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1909 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1910 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1911
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001912- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1913 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1914 (SF patch #664376.)
1915
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001916- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1917 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1918 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1919 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1920 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1921 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001922 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001923
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001924- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1925 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1926 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1927 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001928 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001929
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001930- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1931 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1932 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1933 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1934 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1935 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1936 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1937 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1938 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1939 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1940 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1941
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001942- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1943 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1944 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1945 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1946 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1947 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1948
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001949- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1950 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1951
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001952- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1953 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1954 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1955 case.)
1956
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001957- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1958 passed as unicode strings.
1959
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001960- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1961 See SF bug #683467.
1962
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001963- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1964 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1965
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001966- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1967
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001968- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1969
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001970- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1971 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1972 arguments.
1973
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001974- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1975 See SF bug #667147.
1976
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001977- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001978 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001979 See SF bug #676155.
1980
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001981- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001982 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001983 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1984 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1985 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1986 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1987 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1988 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001989
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001990Extension modules
1991-----------------
1992
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001993- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1994 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1995 tp_as_number pointer.
1996
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001997- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1998 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1999 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2000 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2001 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2002
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002003- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2004
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002005- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2006
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002007- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002008 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002009 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2010 patch #678531.)
2011
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002012- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2013 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2014
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002015- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2016 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2017
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002018- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2019
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002020- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2021 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2022 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2023
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002024- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2025
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002026- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2027 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2028
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002029- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002030
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002031- datetime changes:
2032
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002033 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2034
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002035 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2036 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2037 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2038 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2039 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2040 now.
2041
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002042 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002043 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2044 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002045
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002046 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002047 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002048 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2049 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2050 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2051 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002052
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002053 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2054 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2055 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002056 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2057
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002058 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2059 by a later example coded by Guido.
2060
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002061 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002062 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2063 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2064 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002065 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2066 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2067
2068 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2069 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2070 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2071 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2072 tzinfo subclass instance.
2073
2074 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2075 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2076 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2077 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2078 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2079 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2080 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2081 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002082
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002083 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2084 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2085 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2086 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2087 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002088 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2089
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002090 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002091
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002092 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2093 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2094 as a naive datetime object.
2095
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002096 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2097 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2098 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2099
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002100 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2101 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2102 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2103 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2104 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2105 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2106 comparison.
2107
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002108 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2109 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2110 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2111 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002112 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002113
2114 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002115
2116 and ::
2117
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002118 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2119
2120 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2121 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2122 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2123 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2124
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002125 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2126 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2127 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2128 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2129 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2130
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002131 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2132 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002133 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2134 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002135
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002136Library
2137-------
2138
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002139- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2140 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2141
2142- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2143 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2144 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2145 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2146 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2147 See PEP 307 for details.
2148
2149- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2150 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2151
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002152- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2153 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002154 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002155 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2156 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002157 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002158
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002159- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2160 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2161
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002162- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2163 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2164 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2165
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002166- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2167
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002168- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2169 exception.
2170
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002171- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2172 class.
2173
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002174- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2175 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2176 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2177
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002178- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2179 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2180
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002181- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002182 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2183 See SF bug #659228.
2184
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002185- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2186 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2187 See SF patch #651082.
2188
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002189- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002190
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002191- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2192 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2193
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002194- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002195 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002196
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002197- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2198 DOS paths from other platforms.
2199
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002200Tools/Demos
2201-----------
2202
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002203- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2204 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2205 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2206 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2207 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2208 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2209 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2210 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2211 example:
2212
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002213 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2214 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002215
2216 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2217
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002218
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002219Build
2220-----
2221
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002222- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2223 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2224 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002225 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2226
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002227 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2228
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002229- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2230 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2231 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2232 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2233 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2234 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2235 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2236 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2237 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2238
2239- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2240 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2241 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2242 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2243
2244- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2245 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2246
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002247C API
2248-----
2249
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002250- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2251 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002252
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002253- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2254 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2255 tp_as_number pointer.
2256
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002257- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2258 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2259 (SF #681367)
2260
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002261- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2262 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2263 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2264 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002265
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002266Tests
2267-----
2268
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002269- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002270 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2271 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2272 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2273 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2274 pydoc.)
2275
2276- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2277
2278- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002279
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002280Windows
2281-------
2282
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002283- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2284 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2285 time).
2286
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002287- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2288 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2289
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002290- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2291 release without strong cryptography.
2292
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002293- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002294 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002295
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002296- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2297 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2298
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002299Mac
2300---
2301
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002302- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2303 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002304
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002305- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2306 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2307 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002308
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002309- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2310 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002311
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002312- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2313 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2314 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2315 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002316
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002317- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002318 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2319 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2320 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002321
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002322
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002323What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002324=================================
2325
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002326*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002327
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002328Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002329--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002330
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002331- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2332
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002333- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2334 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002335 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002336 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002337 a different meaning than before.
2338
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002339- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002340 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002341 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002342
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002343- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002344 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002345 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002346
2347- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2348 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2349 and deallocation.
2350
2351- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2352 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2353
2354- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2355 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2356 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2357 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2358 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2359
2360- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2361 now detected by the garbage collector.
2362
2363- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2364 [SF bug 519621]
2365
2366- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2367 identifier.
2368
2369- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2370 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2371 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2372 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2373 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2374 [SF bug 563060]
2375
2376- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2377 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2378 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2379 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2380 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2381
2382- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2383 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2384 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2385
2386- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2387
2388- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2389 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2390 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2391 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2392 state of the slots would be lost.)
2393
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002394Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002395-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002396
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002397- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002398 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2399 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2400 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2401 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002402 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2403 Jython 2.1.
2404
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002405- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002406 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002407 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2408 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2409 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2410 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2411 these, see PEP 302.
2412
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002413- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2414 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2415 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2416
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002417- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2418 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2419 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2420
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002421- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2422 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2423 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2424
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002425- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2426 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2427 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2428 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2429 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2430 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2431 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2432 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2433 releases or implementations.
2434
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002435- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002436 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2437 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002438
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002439- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2440 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2441
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002442- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2443 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2444 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2445
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002446- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2447 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2448
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002449- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2450 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002451 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2452 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002453
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002454- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2455 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2456 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2457 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2458 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2459
2460 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2461 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2462 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2463 pattern.
2464
2465 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2466 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2467 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2468 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2469
2470 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2471 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2472 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2473 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2474 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2475 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2476
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002477- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2478 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2479 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2480 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2481 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2482 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2483 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2484 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002485
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002486- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2487 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2488 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2489 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2490 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002491 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2492 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2493 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2494 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2495 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2496 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2497 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002498
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002499- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2500 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2501
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002502- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2503 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2504 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2505 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2506 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2507 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2508 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2509 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2510 to Zack Weinberg!
2511
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002512- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2513 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2514 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2515 type. This has been fixed now.
2516
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002517- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2518 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2519 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2520
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002521- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2522 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2523 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2524 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2525 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2526 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2527 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2528 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002529 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002530
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002531- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2532 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2533 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002534
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002535- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2536 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2537 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2538 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2539 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2540 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2541 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2542 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002543 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002544 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2545 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2546
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002547- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2548 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2549 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2550 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2551 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2552 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2553 this.)
2554
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002555- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2556 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002557 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002558 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002559 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2560 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002561 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2562 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002563
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002564- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2565 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2566 currently running.
2567
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002568- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2569 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2570 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2571 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2572
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002573- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2574 as directory names.
2575
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002576- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2577 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2578
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002579- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2580 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2581
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002582- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002583 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2584 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002585
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002586- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2587 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2588 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2589 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2590 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2591
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002592- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2593 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2594 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2595 removed.
2596
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002597- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2598 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2599 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2600
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002601- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2602 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2603 to __debug__.
2604
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002605- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2606 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2607 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2608
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002609- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2610 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2611 deprecated now.
2612
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002613- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2614 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2615 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002616
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002617- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2618 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2619 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2620 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2621 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002622
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002623- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2624 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2625
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002626- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2627 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2628 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002629 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002630 is backward compatible.
2631
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002632- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2633 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2634 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2635 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2636 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2637
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002638- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2639 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2640 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2641 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2642 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2643 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002644
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002645- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2646 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2647
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002648- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2649 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2650
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002651- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2652 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2653 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2654 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2655 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2656
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002657- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2658 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2659 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2660
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002661- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002662 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2663
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002664- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2665 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2666 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002667
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002668- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2669 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2670
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002671- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2672 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2673 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2674
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002675- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2676
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002677Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002678-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002679
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002680- Added three operators to the operator module:
2681 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2682 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2683 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2684
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002685- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2686
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002687- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2688 archives.
2689
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002690- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2691 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2692 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2693
2694 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2695
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002696- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2697 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2698 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002699 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002700
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002701- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2702 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2703 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2704 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002705 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2706 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2707 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2708 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002709
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002710- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2711 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002712
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002713- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2714
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002715- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2716 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2717
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002718- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2719 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2720 supported.
2721
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002722- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2723
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002724- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2725 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002726
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002727- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2728 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2729
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002730- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2731
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002732- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2733 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2734
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002735- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2736 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2737 functions but callable type objects.
2738
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002739- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002740 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002741 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002742
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002743- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2744 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002745
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002746- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2747 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002748
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002749- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2750 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2751 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2752 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2753
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002754- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2755 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002756
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002757- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2758 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2759 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2760 and __imul__.
2761
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002762- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002763 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2764 is called.
2765
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002766- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2767 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2768 interpreter was compiled.
2769
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002770- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2771 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2772 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002773 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002774 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2775 1, not 2.
2776
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002777- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2778 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2779 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2780 limit.
2781
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002782- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2783 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2784 bug #623464.
2785
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002786- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2787 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2788 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2789 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2790
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002791Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002792-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002793
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002794- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2795
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002796- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2797 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2798 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2799 with Python 2.3a2.
2800
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002801- os.path exposes getctime.
2802
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002803- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002804 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002805 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002806 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002807 unit tests of floating point results.
2808
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002809- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2810 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2811 has been increased.
2812
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002813- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2814 executed.
2815
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002816- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2817 postinstallation script.
2818
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002819- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2820 test the current module.
2821
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002822- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002823 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2824 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2825 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2826 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2827
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002828- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002829 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002830 Ward's Optik package.
2831
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002832- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2833 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2834 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2835 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2836
2837- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2838 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002839 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002840
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002841- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2842 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2843 shelf are binary pickles.
2844
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002845- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2846 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2847
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002848- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2849 modules are iterators now.
2850
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002851- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2852 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2853 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2854 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2855 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2856 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002857
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002858- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2859 with their entity value.
2860
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002861- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2862
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002863- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2864 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002865
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002866- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2867 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002868 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002869
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002870- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2871 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2872 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2873 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2874 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2875 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2876 main():
2877
2878 import locale
2879 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2880
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002881- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2882 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2883
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002884- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2885 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2886 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2887 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2888 to the new standard.
2889
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002890- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2891 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2892 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2893 an extension to the database.
2894
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002895- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2896 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2897 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2898 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002899 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002900
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002901- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002902 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002903
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002904- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2905 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2906 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2907 bounded integers.
2908
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002909- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2910 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2911 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2912 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2913 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2914 in existence.
2915
2916 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2917 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2918 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2919 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2920 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2921 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2922
2923 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2924 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2925 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2926 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2927
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002928- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2929 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2930 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2931
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002932- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2933
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002934- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2935 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2936 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2937 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2938
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002939- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2940 argument.
2941
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002942- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2943 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2944 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2945 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2946 [SF patch 560794].
2947
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002948- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2949 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2950 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002951 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2952 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2953 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002954
2955- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2956 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002957
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002958- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2959 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2960 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2961 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002962
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002963- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2964 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2965 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2966 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2967 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2968
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002969- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002970
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002971- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2972
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002973- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2974 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2975 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2976 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2977 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2978 identical to None.
2979
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002980- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2981 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2982 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2983 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2984 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2985 results now.
2986
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002987- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2988 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2989
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002990- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2991 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2992 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2993 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2994 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2995 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2996 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2997 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2998
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002999- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3000
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003001- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3002 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3003
3004- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3005 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3006 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3007 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3008 and other systems.
3009
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003010- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3011 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3012 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3013 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 +00003014 work well with these.
3015
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003016- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3017
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003018- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003019 connections.
3020
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003021- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3022 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3023 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3024
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003025- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3026 sets
3027
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003028- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3029 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3030 name.
3031
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003032- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3033 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3034 passed in.
3035
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003036- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003037 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003038 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3039 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003040
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003041- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3042
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003043- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3044
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003045- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3046 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3047 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3048
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003049- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3050 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3051 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3052 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003053 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003054
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003055- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003056 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003057 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003058
3059- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3060 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3061 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3062
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003063- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003064 the value of its expression argument.
3065
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003066- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3067 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3068 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3069
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003070- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3071 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3072 skipstone browser was included.
3073
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003074- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3075 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3076
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003077Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003078-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003079
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003080- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3081 names in addition to accepting file names.
3082
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003083- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3084 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3085 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3086 still used and useful.)
3087
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003088- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3089 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3090 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3091 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003092
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003093- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3094 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3095 the generated binary.
3096
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003097Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003098-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003099
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003100- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3101
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003102- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3103 except in the hands of experts.
3104
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003105- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003106 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3107 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3108 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003109
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003110- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3111 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3112 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3113 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3114 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3115 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3116 builds.
3117
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003118- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3119 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3120 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3121 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3122 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3123 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3124 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3125 new type.
3126
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003127- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003128
3129 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3130 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3131 positive infinities.
3132
3133 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3134 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3135 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3136 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3137 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3138 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3139 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3140
3141 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3142
3143 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3144
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003145- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3146 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3147 size of the executable.
3148
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003149- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3150 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3151 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3152 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003153
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003154- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3155
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003156- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3157 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3158 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003159
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003160- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3161 well as Unix.
3162
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003163- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3164 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3165 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3166 modules in the README file for details.
3167
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003168C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003169-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003170
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003171- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3172 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003173 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003174 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003175 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003176
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003177- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3178 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3179 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3180 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3181 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3182 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003183 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003184 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3185 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3186 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3187 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3188 aligned.)
3189
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003190- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3191 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3192 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3193
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003194- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3195 level.
3196
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003197- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3198 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3199 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3200 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3201 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3202
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003203- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3204 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3205 code.
3206
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003207- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3208 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3209 adjusting for negative indices.
3210
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003211- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3212 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3213 object.
3214
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003215- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3216 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3217 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3218
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003219- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3220 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003221
3222- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3223
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003224- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3225 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3226 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3227 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3228
3229- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3230
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003231- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003232
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003233- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003234 without going through the buffer API.
3235
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003236- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003237
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003238- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3239 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3240 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3241 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3242
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003243- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3244 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3245
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003246- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003247 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3248
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003249New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003250-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003251
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003252- OpenVMS is now supported.
3253
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003254- AtheOS is now supported.
3255
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003256- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3257
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003258- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3259
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003260Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003261-----
3262
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003263- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3264 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3265 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003266
3267Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003268-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003269
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003270- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3271 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3272 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3273 bugs.
3274 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003275 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003276 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3277 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003278 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003279
3280- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003281 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003282
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003283- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3284 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3285
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003286- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3287 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003288 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003289 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3290
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003291- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3292 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3293 use files" uninstall option).
3294
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003295- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3296
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003297- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3298 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3299
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003300- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3301 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3302 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3303
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003304- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3305 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3306 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3307 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3308 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003309 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3310 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3311 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003312
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003313- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003314 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003315 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3316 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3317 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3318 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3319 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3320 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3321 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3322 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3323 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3324 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3325 work around.
3326
3327- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3328 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3329 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3330 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3331 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3332 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3333 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3334 specified with O_CREAT too).
3335
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003336Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003337----
3338
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003339- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003340
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003341- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3342 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3343 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3344
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003345- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3346 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3347 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3348
3349- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3350 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3351 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3352 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3353 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3354 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3355 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3356 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003357
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003358- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3359 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3360 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003361
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003362- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3363 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3364 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3365 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3366 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003367
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003368- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3369 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3370 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003371
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003372- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3373 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003374
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003375- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3376 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3377 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3378 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3379 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003380
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003381- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3382 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3383 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3384
3385- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3386 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3387 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003388
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003389- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3390 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3391 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3392 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003393 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003394
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003395- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3396 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003397
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003398- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3399 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003400
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003401- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003402 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003403 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3404 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003405
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003406
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003407What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003408===============================
3409
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003410*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3411
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003412Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003413--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003414
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003415- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3416 with a custom metaclass.
3417
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003418Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003419-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003420
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003421- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3422 are proxies.
3423
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003424Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003425-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003426
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003427- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3428 very short strings.
3429
3430- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3431 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3432 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3433 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3434 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3435
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003436Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003437-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003438
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003439- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3440 close or delete time).
3441
3442- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3443 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3444
3445- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3446
3447- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003448 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003449
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003450Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003451-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003452
3453Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003454-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003455
3456C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003457-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003458
3459New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003460-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003461
3462Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003463-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003464
3465Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003466-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003467
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003468- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3469
3470- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3471 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3472
3473- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3474 deleted at process exit time.
3475
3476- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3477 in backslash.
3478
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003479Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003480----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003481
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003482- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3483 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3484 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3485
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003486
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003487What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003488===========================
3489
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003490*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3491
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003492Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003493--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003494
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003495- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3496 been extensively updated. See
3497
3498 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3499
3500 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3501
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003502- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3503 deleted!
3504
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003505- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3506 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3507 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3508 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3509 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3510
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003511- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3512
3513 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3514 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3515
3516 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3517 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3518 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3519 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3520 supported anyway.
3521
3522 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3523 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3524
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003525- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3526 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3527 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3528 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3529 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003530
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003531- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3532 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3533 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3534
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003535Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003536-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003537
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003538- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3539 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3540 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3541 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3542 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3543 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003544 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3545 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3546 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3547 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003548
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003549- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3550 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3551 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3552
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003553Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003554-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003555
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003556- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3557
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003558Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003559-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003560
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003561- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3562 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3563 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3564 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3565 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3566 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3567
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003568- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3569
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003570- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3571
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003572- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3573
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003574- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3575 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3576 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3577
3578- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3579
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003580Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003581-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003582
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003583- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3584 off a search on Google.
3585
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003586Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003587-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003588
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003589- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3590 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3591 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3592 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3593 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3594 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3595 other platforms should do likewise.
3596
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003597- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3598 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3599 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3600
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003601C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003602-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003603
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003604- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3605 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3606 producing key-value pairs.
3607
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003608- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003609 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003610 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3611 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3612 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3613 previously went unchallenged.
3614
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003615New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003616-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003617
3618Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003619-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003620
3621Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003622-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003623
3624Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003625----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003626
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003627- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3628 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003629
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003630- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3631 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3632 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3633 home.
3634
3635
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003636What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003637===========================
3638
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003639*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3640
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003641Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003642--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003643
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003644- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3645 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003646
3647 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003648 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003649
3650 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3651 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003652 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003653 This needs to be documented.
3654
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003655- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3656 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3657
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003658- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3659 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3660 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3661
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003662- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3663 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3664
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003665- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3666 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3667 class forbids it).
3668
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003669- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3670 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3671 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3672
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003673- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3674
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003675Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003676-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003677
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003678- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3679 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003680 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003681
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003682- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3683 (like 1 + '').
3684
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003685Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003686-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003687
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003688- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3689 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3690 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3691 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003692 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003693 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3694
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003695- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3696 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3697 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3698 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3699
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003700- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3701 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003702 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3703 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3704 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003705
3706- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3707 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003708
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003709- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3710 bytes on its input.
3711
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003712Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003713-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003714
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003715- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003716 convenience function.
3717
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003718- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3719 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3720 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003721 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3722 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3723 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3724 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3725 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3726 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003727
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003728- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3729 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3730 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3731 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3732
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003733- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3734 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3735 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3736
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003737- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3738 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3739 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3740 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3741
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003742- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3743 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003744 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003745 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3746 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3747 new -l and -e options.
3748
3749- statcache is now deprecated.
3750
3751- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3752 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003753 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003754 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3755 time properly taken into account.
3756
3757- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3758 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3759 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3760 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3761
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003762Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003763-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003764
3765Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003766-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003767
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003768- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3769 is built with libdb3 if available.
3770
3771- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3772
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003773C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003774-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003775
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003776- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3777 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3778 PySequence_Size().
3779
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003780- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3781
3782- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3783 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3784 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3785
3786- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3787 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3788
3789- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3790 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3791
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003792New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003793-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003794
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003795- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3796 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3797
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003798- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3799 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3800
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003801- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3802
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003803Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003804-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003805
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003806- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3807 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3808
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003809Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003810-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003811
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003812Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003813----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003814
3815- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3816 removed completely in the next release.
3817
3818- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3819 OSX.
3820
3821- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3822 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3823
3824- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3825
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003826
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003827What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003828===========================
3829
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003830*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3831
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003832Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003833--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003834
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003835- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003836 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003837 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003838 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3839 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003840 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3841 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003842 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3843 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003844
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003845- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3846 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3847
3848- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3849 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3850
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003851Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003852-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003853
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003854- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3855 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3856 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3857 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3858 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3859 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3860 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3861 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3862
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003863- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3864 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3865 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3866 example).
3867
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003868- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003869 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003870 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003871 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003872
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003873- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3874 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3875 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003876 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003877
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003878- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3879 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3880 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3881 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3882 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3883 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3884
3885 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3886
3887 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3888
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003889Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003890-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003891
3892- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3893
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003894- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3895
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003896- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3897 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003898
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003899- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3900 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3901 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3902 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3903 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3904 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003905 attributes.
3906
3907- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3908 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3909 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003910
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003911- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3912 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3913 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003914
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003915- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3916 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3917 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003918 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3919 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3920
3921- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3922 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003923
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003924Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003925-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003926
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003927- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3928 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3929
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003930- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3931 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3932 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3933 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3934
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003935- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3936 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3937 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3938 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3939
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003940 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3941 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3942 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3943 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3944 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3945 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3946 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3947 without losing information).
3948
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003949- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003950 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3951 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3952 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3953 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3954 module).
3955
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003956 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003957 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3958 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3959 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3960 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003961
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003962- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003963 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3964 encoding.
3965
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003966- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3967 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3968
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003969- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003970 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3971
3972- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3973 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3974 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3975 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3976
3977- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3978
3979- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3980 ON, and OFF.
3981
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003982- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3983 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3984
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003985Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003986-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003987
3988- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3989 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3990 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003991
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003992- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3993 been added: -X and -E.
3994
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003995Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003996-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003997
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003998- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3999 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4000
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004001C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004002-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004003
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004004- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4005 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4006 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4007 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4008 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4009
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004010- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4011 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4012 as long) arguments.
4013
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004014- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4015 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4016 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4017 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4018 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4019 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4020
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004021- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4022 input.
4023
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004024New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004025-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004026
4027Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004028-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004029
4030Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004031-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004032
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004033- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4034 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4035 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4036
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004037- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4038 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4039 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004040 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004041
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004042 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4043 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4044 import signal
4045 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004046
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004047 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004048 while 1:
4049 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004050 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004051 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4052 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4053 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4054 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004055
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004056
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004057What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4058===========================
4059
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004060*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4061
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004062Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004063--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004064
4065- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4066 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4067 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4068
4069- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4070 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4071 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4072 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4073 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4074 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4075 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004076
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004077- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004078 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004079 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4080 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4081 associate a docstring with a property.
4082
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004083- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4084 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4085 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4086 other built-in object types.
4087
4088- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4089 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4090 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4091 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4092 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4093
4094- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4095 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4096
4097- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4098 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004099 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004100 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4101 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4102 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4103 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4104 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4105
4106- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4107 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4108 class.
4109
4110- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4111 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4112 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4113 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4114
4115- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4116 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4117 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4118 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4119
4120- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4121 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4122
4123- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4124 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4125 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4126 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4127 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004128 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004129 with the same value as s.
4130
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004131- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4132
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004133Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004134----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004135
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004136- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4137
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004138- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4139 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4140 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4141 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4142 objects.
4143
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004144- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4145 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004146 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4147 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4148
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004149- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4150 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4151 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4152
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004153Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004154-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004155
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004156- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4157 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4158 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4159 by the instances.
4160
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004161- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4162 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4163 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4164
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004165- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4166 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4167 before the entire comparison is complete.
4168
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004169- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4170 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4171 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4172
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004173- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4174 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4175 getwriter().
4176
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004177- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4178 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4179
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004180- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004181 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4182 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4183
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004184- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4185 iterable object.
4186
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004187- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4188 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004189
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004190- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4191 authentication.
4192
4193- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4194 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004195
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004196- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004197 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4198 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4199 a sample driver.)
4200
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004201Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004202-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004203
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004204- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4205 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4206 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4207 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4208 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4209 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4210 kernel has large file support.
4211
4212- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4213 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4214 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4215 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4216 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4217
4218- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4219 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4220 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4221
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004222C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004223-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004224
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004225- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4226 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4227
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004228New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004229-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004230
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004231- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4232 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4233
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004234Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004235-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004236
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004237- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4238 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4239 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4240 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4241 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4242
4243- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4244 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4245 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4246 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4247
4248- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4249 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4250
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004251Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004252-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004253
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004254- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004255 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4256 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004257
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004258
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004259What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4260===========================
4261
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004262*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4263
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004264Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004265----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004266
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004267- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4268 big to represent as a C double.
4269
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004270- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4271 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4272 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4273 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4274 restriction).
4275
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004276- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4277 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4278 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4279 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4280 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4281
4282 >>> dir([])
4283 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4284 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4285 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4286 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4287 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4288 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4289 'reverse', 'sort']
4290
4291 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4292
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004293- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004294 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4295 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4296 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4297 OverflowError exception.
4298
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004299- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004300 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004301 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4302 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4303 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4304 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4305 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004306 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004307 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4308 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4309
4310 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4311 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4312 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4313 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004314
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004315- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004316 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4317 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4318 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4319 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4320 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4321 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4322 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4323 once it is created.
4324
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004325- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4326 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4327 (key, value) pairs.
4328
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004329- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004330 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4331 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4332
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004333- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4334 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4335 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4336 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4337 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004338
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004339- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004340 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4341 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4342
4343 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4344
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004345- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004346 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4347
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004348Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004349-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004350
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004351- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004352 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4353 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004354
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004355- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4356 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4357 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4358 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4359 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4360 in this area anymore).
4361
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004362- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4363 threading.Timer.
4364
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004365- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4366 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4367
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004368- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004369 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4370
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004371- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004372 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4373 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4374 converted to Python longs.
4375
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004376- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004377 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4378
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004379- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4380 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4381 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4382
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004383Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004384-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004385
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004386- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4387 division operators as per PEP 238.
4388
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004389Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004390-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004391
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004392- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4393 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4394 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4395 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4396
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004397C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004398-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004399
4400- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004401
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004402- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4403 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004404 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004405
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004406 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4407 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004408 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004409 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004410
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004411- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004412 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4413 module:
4414
4415 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004416
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004417 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4418 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004419
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004420 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4421 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004422
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004423 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4424
4425 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4426
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004427- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004428 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4429 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4430 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004431
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004432New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004433-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004434
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004435- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4436 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4437 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4438 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4439 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004440
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004441Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004442-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004443
4444Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004445-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004446
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004447- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4448 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4449 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4450 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004451 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4452 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4453 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4454 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4455 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004456
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004457- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004458 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4459
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004460
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004461What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4462===========================
4463
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004464*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4465
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004466Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004467-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004468
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004469- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4470 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4471
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004472- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4473 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4474 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004475
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004476- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4477 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4478 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4479 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004480
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004481- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4482
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004483- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004484
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004485Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004486-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004487
4488- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004489 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004490 the module docstring for details.
4491
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004492Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004493-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004494
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004495- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004496 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4497 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4498 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004499
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004500- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4501 Nick Mathewson.
4502
4503Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004504----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004505
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004506- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4507 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4508 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4509 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4510 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4511 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4512 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4513 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4514
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004515- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4516 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4517 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4518 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4519
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004520- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4521 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4522 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4523 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4524 come a long way).
4525
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004526- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4527 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4528 write filters for these warnings).
4529
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004530- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4531 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4532 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4533 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4534 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4535
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004536- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4537 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4538 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4539 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4540 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4541 older distribution.
4542
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004543Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004544-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004545
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004546- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4547 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004548 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004549
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004550- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4551 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4552 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4553
4554- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4555
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004556- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4557
4558- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4559
4560- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4561
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004562- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004563
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004564- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4565
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004566New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004567-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004568
4569C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004570-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004571
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004572- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4573 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4574 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4575 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4576 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4577 against buffer overruns.
4578
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004579- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004580 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4581 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004582 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4583 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4584 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4585
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004586- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4587 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4588 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4589 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4590 deprecated.
4591
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004592Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004593-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004594
4595- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4596 relevant is found.
4597
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004598
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004599What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004600===========================
4601
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004602*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4603
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004604Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004605----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004606
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004607- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4608 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4609 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4610 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4611 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4612 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4613 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4614 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004615 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004616 repaired.
4617
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004618- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004619 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004620 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4621 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4622 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4623 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4624 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4625 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4626 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4627 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4628
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004629- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4630 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4631 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4632 leading BMO character).
4633
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004634- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4635 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4636 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4637
4638 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4639 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4640 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004641
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004642 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4643 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4644 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4645 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4646 for various simple to use conversions.
4647
4648 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4649 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4650
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004651 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4652 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4653 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4654 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4655 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4656 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4657 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4658 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4659 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4660 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4661 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4662 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4663 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4664 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4665 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004666
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004667- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4668 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4669 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004670 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004671 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004672
4673 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004674 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4675 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4676 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4677 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4678 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004679 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4680 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004681
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004682 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4683 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4684 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004685 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004686
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004687- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4688 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4689 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4690 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4691 floating arithmetic,
4692
4693 x = 9007199254740992.0
4694 print long(x)
4695
4696 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4697 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4698 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4699 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4700 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4701 functions are of good quality).
4702
4703 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4704 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4705 algorithms to break.
4706
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004707- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4708 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4709 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4710 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4711 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4712 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4713 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4714 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4715 order.
4716
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004717- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4718 operation along the most common code paths.
4719
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004720- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4721 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4722
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004723- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4724 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4725 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4726 {}.update(UserDict())
4727
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004728- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4729 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4730 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4731 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4732 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4733 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4734 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4735 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4736
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004737- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004738 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004739
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004740 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004741 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4742 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004743 join() method of strings
4744 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004745 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4746 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004747 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004748 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004749
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004750- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4751 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4752
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004753- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4754 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4755
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004756- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4757 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4758 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4759 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4760
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004761- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4762 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004763 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004764 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4765 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004766
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004767- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4768
4769
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004770Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004771-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004772
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004773- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004774 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004775 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4776 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4777
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004778- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4779 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4780
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004781- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4782 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4783 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4784 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4785
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004786- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4787 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4788 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4789
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004790- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4791
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004792- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4793
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004794- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4795 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4796 that are still imported into string.py).
4797
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004798- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4799
4800- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4801 Now it does.
4802
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004803- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4804
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004805- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4806 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4807 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4808 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4809 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004810 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4811 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004812
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004813- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4814 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4815 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4816 'help(object)'.
4817
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004818Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004819-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004820
4821- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004822 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004823 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4824 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4825
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004826- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004827 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4828 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004829
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004830C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004831-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004832
4833- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4834 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004835
4836----
4837
4838**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**