blob: 444231e26ae9f8997d4fcc73cc0e064acb3f739d [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +000015- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
16
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +000017- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
18 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
19 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
20 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
21 This has been repaired.
22
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +000023- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
24 over a sequence.
25
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +000026- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
27
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +000028- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
29 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
30 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
31 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
32 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
33 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
34 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
35 records with equal keys is unchanged).
36
Raymond Hettinger0a9b9da2003-10-29 06:54:43 +000037- Added a list.sorted() classmethod that returns a new sorted list
38 from any iterable.
Alex Martellidd666452003-10-25 13:02:57 +000039
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +000040- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
41 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
42 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
43
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +000044- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
45 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
46 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
47 freelist.
48
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +000049- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
50 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
51
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +000052- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
53 number.
54
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +000055- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
56 a TypeError exception.
57
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +000058- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
59 820195.
60
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +000061- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
62 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
63 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
64
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000065Extension modules
66-----------------
67
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +000068- os.getsid was added.
69
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +000070- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
71 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
72 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
73
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +000074- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
75
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +000076- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
77
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +000078- readline.clear_history was added.
79
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +000080- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
81
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +000082- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
83
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +000084- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
85
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +000086- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
87
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +000088- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
89
90- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
91
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +000092- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
93
94- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
95
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +000096- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
97 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
98 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
99
100- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
101 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
102 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
103 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
104 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
105 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
106 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
107
108- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
109 iterators from a single iterable.
110
111- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
112 of raising a TypeError exception.
113
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000114Library
115-------
116
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000117- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
118
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000119- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
120
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000121- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
122 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
123
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000124- heapq.py has been converted to C for improved performance
125
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000126- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
127 a string).
128
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000129- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
130
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000131- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
132
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000133- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
134
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000135- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
136
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000137- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
138 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
139 list of fieldnames.
140
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000141- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
142 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
143
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000144- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
145
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000146- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
147 empty lists.
148
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000149- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
150 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
151 and shelves.
152
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000153- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
154 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
155
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000156- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000157 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
158 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000159
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000160- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
161 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
162 allow any iterable. Also the Set.update() has been deprecated because
163 it duplicates Set.union_update().
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000164
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000165- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000166 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
167 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
168
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000169- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
170 and removed in Py2.4.
171
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000172- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
173
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000174Tools/Demos
175-----------
176
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000177- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
178
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000179- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
180 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
181 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
182 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
183
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000184- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
185
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000186- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
187 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
188 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
189 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
190 now.
191
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000192- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
193 in effect
194
195- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
196 C-c C-h
197
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000198- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
199 -d option was given.
200
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000201Build
202-----
203
204C API
205-----
206
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000207- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
208 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
209
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000210- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
211 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
212 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
213 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
214
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000215New platforms
216-------------
217
218Tests
219-----
220
221Windows
222-------
223
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000224- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
225 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
226 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
227
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000228Mac
229----
230
231
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000232What's New in Python 2.3 final?
233===============================
234
235*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
236
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000237IDLE
238----
239
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000240- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
241 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
242 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
243 context-menu actions.
244
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000245- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
246 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
247 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
248 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
249 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
250 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
251 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
252 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
253 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
254
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000255
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000256What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
257=============================================
258
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000259*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000260
261Core and builtins
262-----------------
263
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000264- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000265 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000266 comment at the end are still unsupported.
267
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000268Extension modules
269-----------------
270
271- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
272 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
273 than once. This has been fixed.
274
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000275- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
276 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
277 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
278 call.
279
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000280- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
281
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000282Library
283-------
284
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000285- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
286 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
287
288- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
289 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
290 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
291 restored.
292
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000293IDLE
294----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000295
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000296- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000297
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000298Build
299-----
300
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000301- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
302 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
303
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000304C API
305-----
306
307Windows
308-------
309
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000310- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
311 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
312
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000313- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
314
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000315Mac
316---
317
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000318- Various fixes to pimp.
319
320- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
321
322- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
323 more problems than it solves.
324
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000325
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000326What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
327=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000328
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000329*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
330
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000331Core and builtins
332-----------------
333
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000334- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
335 by sys.setcheckinterval().
336
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000337- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
338 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000339 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000340
341- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
342 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
343 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000344 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000345
346- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
347 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000348
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000349- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
350 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
351 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
352
353- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000354 770247.
355
356- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000357
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000358Extension modules
359-----------------
360
361- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
362 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
363
364- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
365
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000366- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
367
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000368- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
369 contained within the _strptime module.
370
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000371- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
372 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
373
374- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000375 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
376
377- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
378 the find_class attribute, if present.
379
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000380- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000381
382 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
383 (SF bug 763298).
384
385 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000386 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
387 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
388 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000389
390 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
391
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000392Library
393-------
394
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000395- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
396
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000397- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
398 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
399 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
400 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
401 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
402 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
403 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
404 or Tester().
405
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000406- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
407 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
408 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
409 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
410 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
411 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
412 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
413 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
414 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000415
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000416 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000417
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000418- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
419 weren't before was an oversight.
420
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000421- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
422 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
423
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000424- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
425 when there are no lines.
426
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000427- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
428 which could occur with Tk 8.4
429
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000430- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
431 to child processes.
432
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000433- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
434
435- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
436
437- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
438 xmlrpclib.
439
440- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
441 responses.
442
443- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
444 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
445
446- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
447 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
448 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
449
450- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
451 used as patterns.
452
453- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
454 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
455 than Tk 8.3.
456
457- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
458
459- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000460
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000461Tools/Demos
462-----------
463
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000464- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
465
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000466- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
467
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000468- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000469
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000470Build
471-----
472
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000473- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
474
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000475- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
476
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000477- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
478 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000479
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000480- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
481 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
482 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000483
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000484C API
485-----
486
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000487- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
488 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
489
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000490Windows
491-------
492
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000493- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
494 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
495 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
496 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
497 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
498 Python exception ::
499
500 thread.error: can't start new thread
501
502 is raised now.
503
504- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
505 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
506 instead of from DLL teardown.
507
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000508Mac
509---
510
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000511- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000512 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000513 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
514 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
515 the executable in the bundle.
516
517- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000518
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000519- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
520
521- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
522 on Panther.
523
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000524What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
525================================
526
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000527*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000528
529Core and builtins
530-----------------
531
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000532- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
533 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
534 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
535 with the -i option.
536
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000537- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
538 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
539
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000540- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
541 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
542
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000543- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
544 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
545 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
546 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
547 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
548 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
549 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
550 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
551 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
552 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
553 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
554 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
555 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000556
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000557- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
558 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
559 embedded in a lambda expression.
560
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000561- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
562 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
563 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
564 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
565 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
566
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000567- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
568 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
569 matches the restriction on classic classes.
570
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000571- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
572 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
573
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000574- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
575 It's writable again.
576
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000577- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
578 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
579 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000580 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000581
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000582- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
583 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
584 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
585
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000586Extension modules
587-----------------
588
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000589- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
590 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
591
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000592- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
593 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
594 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
595 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
596
597- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
598 collection.
599
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000600- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
601 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
602 unique within a single program run.
603
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000604- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
605 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
606
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000607- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
608 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
609
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000610- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
611 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000612
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000613- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
614
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000615- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
616 Fixes SF bug #730685.
617
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000618- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
619 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
620 for many BSD-derived systems.
621
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000622
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000623Library
624-------
625
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000626- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
627 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
628 primary ones:
629
630 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
631 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
632 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
633
634 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
635 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
636 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
637 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
638 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
639 framework features (which doctest lacks).
640
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000641- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
642 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
643 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
644 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
645 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
646 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
647 argument.
648
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000649- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
650 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
651 in the archive.
652
653- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
654 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
655
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000656- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
657 569574).
658
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000659- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
660 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
661 no more.
662
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000663- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
664 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
665 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
666 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
667 code coverage.
668
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000669- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
670 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
671 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000672 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
673 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000674
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000675- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
676 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
677 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000678 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000679
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000680- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
681
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000682- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
683 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
684 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
685 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
686
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000687- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
688 handling.
689
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000690- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
691 __doc__ of data descriptors.
692
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000693- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
694 in socket.py.
695
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000696- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
697
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000698- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
699 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
700 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
701 opener with proxy support.
702
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000703- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
704
705- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
706
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000707Tools/Demos
708-----------
709
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000710- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
711
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000712- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
713
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000714- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
715 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000716
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000717- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
718 files.
719
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000720Build
721-----
722
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000723- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000724 different root directory.
725
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000726C API
727-----
728
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000729- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
730 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
731 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
732 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
733 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
734 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
735 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
736 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
737 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
738 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
739
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000740- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
741 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
742 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
743 from Python.
744
745
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000746New platforms
747-------------
748
749None this time.
750
751Tests
752-----
753
754- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
755 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
756
757Windows
758-------
759
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000760- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
761
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000762- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
763 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
764 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
765 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
766 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
767 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
768 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
769 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
770 that's what it's for.
771
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000772Mac
773---
774
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000775- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
776 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
777 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
778 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000779- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
780 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
781- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000782
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000783SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
784------------------------------------
785
786430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
787598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
788622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
789661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
790683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
791697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
792713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
793724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
794727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
795729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
796730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
797731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
798732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
799733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
800735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
801740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
802744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
803745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
804747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
805749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
806751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
807753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
808755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
809757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
810760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
811
812
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000813What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
814================================
815
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000816*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000817
818Core and builtins
819-----------------
820
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000821- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
822 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
823
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000824- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
825 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
826 and cannot be strings).
827
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000828- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
829 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
830 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
831 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
832
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000833- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
834 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
835 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
836 Python itself.
837
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000838- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
839 the referenced object, if it has one.
840
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000841- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
842 the thread started at
843 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
844
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000845- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
846 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
847 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
848 placed on a list index.
849
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000850- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
851 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
852 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
853 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
854
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000855- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
856 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
857 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
858 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
859 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
860 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
861 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
862
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000863- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
864 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
865 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
866 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
867 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
868
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000869- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
870 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000871
872- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
873 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
874 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
875 #693195.)
876
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000877- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
878 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000879
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000880- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000881 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000882 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
883 interpreter executions, would fail.
884
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000885- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000886 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000887 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000888
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000889Extension modules
890-----------------
891
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000892- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
893 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
894 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
895 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
896
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000897- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
898 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
899
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000900- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
901 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
902 and Greg Chapman.)
903
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000904- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
905 recursively.
906
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000907- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000908 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
909 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
910 leaks.
911
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000912- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
913
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000914- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
915 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
916 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
917 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
918 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
919 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
920 #705836.
921
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000922- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000923 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
924
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000925- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
926 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
927 See SF bug #692416.
928
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000929- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
930 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
931
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000932- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
933 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
934 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000935
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000936- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000937 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
938 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
939
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000940- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
941 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
942 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
943 timeouts to work properly.
944
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000945Library
946-------
947
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000948- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
949 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
950 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
951 future release.
952
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000953- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
954 for querying platform dependent features.
955
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000956- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000957
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000958- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
959 pickle protocol versions.
960
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000961- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
962 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
963 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
964
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000965- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
966
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000967- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
968 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
969 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
970 modules.
971
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000972- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
973 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
974 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
975
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000976- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
977 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
978
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000979- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
980 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
981 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
982
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000983- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000984 MS Office extensions.
985
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000986- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
987 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
988
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000989- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
990 execution speed of expressions and statements.
991
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000992- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
993 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
994 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
995 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
996 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
997 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
998
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000999- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1000 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1001 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001002
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001003- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1004 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1005 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1006
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001007- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1008
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001009- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1010 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1011 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1012
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001013Tools/Demos
1014-----------
1015
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001016- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1017 See the module docstring for details.
1018
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001019Build
1020-----
1021
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001022- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1023 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001024
1025C API
1026-----
1027
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001028- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1029
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001030- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1031 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1032 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1033
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001034- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1035 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001036
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001037 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1038 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1039 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001040
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001041- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001042 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1043
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001044- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1045 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1046 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001047
1048New platforms
1049-------------
1050
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001051None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001052
1053Tests
1054-----
1055
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001056- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1057 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001058
1059Windows
1060-------
1061
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001062- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1063 function.
1064
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001065- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1066 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001067
1068Mac
1069---
1070
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001071- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1072 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001073
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001074- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1075 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001076
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001077- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1078 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1079 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001080
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001081- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001082 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1083 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001084
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001085- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1086 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001087
1088
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001089What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1090=================================
1091
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001092*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001093
1094Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001095-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001096
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001097- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1098 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1099 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1100
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001101- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1102 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1103 (SF patch #664376.)
1104
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001105- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1106 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1107 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1108 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1109 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1110 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001111 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001112
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001113- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1114 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1115 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1116 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001117 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001118
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001119- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1120 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1121 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1122 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1123 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1124 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1125 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1126 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1127 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1128 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1129 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1130
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001131- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1132 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1133 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1134 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1135 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1136 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1137
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001138- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1139 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1140
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001141- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1142 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1143 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1144 case.)
1145
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001146- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1147 passed as unicode strings.
1148
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001149- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1150 See SF bug #683467.
1151
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001152- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1153 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1154
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001155- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1156
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001157- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1158
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001159- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1160 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1161 arguments.
1162
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001163- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1164 See SF bug #667147.
1165
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001166- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001167 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001168 See SF bug #676155.
1169
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001170- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001171 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001172 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1173 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1174 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1175 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1176 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1177 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001178
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001179Extension modules
1180-----------------
1181
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001182- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1183 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1184 tp_as_number pointer.
1185
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001186- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1187 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1188 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1189 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1190 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1191
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001192- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1193
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001194- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1195
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001196- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001197 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001198 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1199 patch #678531.)
1200
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001201- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1202 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1203
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001204- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1205 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1206
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001207- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1208
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001209- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1210 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1211 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1212
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001213- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1214
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001215- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1216 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1217
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001218- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001219
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001220- datetime changes:
1221
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001222 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1223
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001224 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1225 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1226 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1227 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1228 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1229 now.
1230
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001231 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001232 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1233 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001234
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001235 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001236 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001237 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1238 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1239 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1240 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001241
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001242 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1243 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1244 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001245 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1246
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001247 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1248 by a later example coded by Guido.
1249
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001250 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001251 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1252 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1253 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001254 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1255 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1256
1257 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1258 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1259 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1260 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1261 tzinfo subclass instance.
1262
1263 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1264 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1265 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1266 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1267 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1268 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1269 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1270 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001271
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001272 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1273 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1274 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1275 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1276 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001277 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1278
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001279 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001280
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001281 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1282 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1283 as a naive datetime object.
1284
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001285 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1286 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1287 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1288
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001289 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1290 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1291 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1292 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1293 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1294 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1295 comparison.
1296
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001297 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1298 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1299 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1300 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001301 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001302
1303 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001304
1305 and ::
1306
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001307 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1308
1309 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1310 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1311 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1312 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1313
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001314 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1315 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1316 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1317 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1318 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1319
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001320 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1321 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001322 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1323 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001324
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001325Library
1326-------
1327
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001328- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1329 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1330
1331- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1332 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1333 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1334 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1335 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1336 See PEP 307 for details.
1337
1338- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1339 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1340
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001341- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1342 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001343 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001344 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1345 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001346 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001347
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001348- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1349 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1350
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001351- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1352 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1353 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1354
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001355- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1356
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001357- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1358 exception.
1359
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001360- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1361 class.
1362
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001363- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1364 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1365 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1366
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001367- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1368 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1369
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001370- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001371 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1372 See SF bug #659228.
1373
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001374- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1375 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1376 See SF patch #651082.
1377
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001378- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001379
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001380- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1381 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1382
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001383- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001384 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001385
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001386- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1387 DOS paths from other platforms.
1388
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001389Tools/Demos
1390-----------
1391
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001392- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1393 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1394 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1395 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1396 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1397 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1398 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1399 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1400 example:
1401
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001402 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1403 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001404
1405 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1406
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001407
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001408Build
1409-----
1410
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001411- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1412 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1413 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001414 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1415
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001416 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1417
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001418- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1419 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1420 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1421 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1422 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1423 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1424 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1425 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1426 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1427
1428- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1429 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1430 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1431 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1432
1433- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1434 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1435
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001436C API
1437-----
1438
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001439- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1440 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001441
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001442- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1443 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1444 tp_as_number pointer.
1445
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001446- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1447 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1448 (SF #681367)
1449
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001450- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1451 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1452 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1453 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001454
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001455Tests
1456-----
1457
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001458- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001459 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1460 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1461 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1462 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1463 pydoc.)
1464
1465- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1466
1467- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001468
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001469Windows
1470-------
1471
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001472- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1473 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1474 time).
1475
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001476- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1477 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1478
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001479- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1480 release without strong cryptography.
1481
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001482- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001483 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001484
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001485- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1486 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1487
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001488Mac
1489---
1490
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001491- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1492 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001493
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001494- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1495 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1496 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001497
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001498- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1499 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001500
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001501- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1502 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1503 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1504 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001505
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001506- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001507 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1508 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1509 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001510
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001511
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001512What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001513=================================
1514
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001515*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001516
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001517Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001518--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001519
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001520- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1521
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001522- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1523 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001524 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001525 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001526 a different meaning than before.
1527
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001528- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001529 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001530 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001531
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001532- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001533 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001534 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001535
1536- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1537 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1538 and deallocation.
1539
1540- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1541 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1542
1543- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1544 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1545 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1546 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1547 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1548
1549- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1550 now detected by the garbage collector.
1551
1552- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1553 [SF bug 519621]
1554
1555- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1556 identifier.
1557
1558- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1559 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1560 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1561 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1562 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1563 [SF bug 563060]
1564
1565- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1566 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1567 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1568 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1569 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1570
1571- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1572 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1573 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1574
1575- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1576
1577- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1578 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1579 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1580 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1581 state of the slots would be lost.)
1582
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001583Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001584-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001585
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001586- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001587 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1588 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1589 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1590 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001591 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1592 Jython 2.1.
1593
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001594- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001595 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001596 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1597 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1598 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1599 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1600 these, see PEP 302.
1601
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001602- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1603 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1604 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1605
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001606- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1607 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1608 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1609
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001610- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1611 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1612 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1613
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001614- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1615 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1616 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1617 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1618 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1619 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1620 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1621 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1622 releases or implementations.
1623
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001624- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001625 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1626 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001627
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001628- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1629 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1630
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001631- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1632 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1633 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1634
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001635- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1636 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1637
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001638- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1639 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001640 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1641 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001642
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001643- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1644 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1645 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1646 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1647 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1648
1649 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1650 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1651 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1652 pattern.
1653
1654 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1655 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1656 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1657 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1658
1659 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1660 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1661 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1662 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1663 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1664 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1665
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001666- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1667 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1668 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1669 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1670 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1671 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1672 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1673 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001674
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001675- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1676 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1677 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1678 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1679 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001680 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1681 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1682 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1683 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1684 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1685 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1686 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001687
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001688- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1689 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1690
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001691- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1692 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1693 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1694 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1695 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1696 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1697 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1698 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1699 to Zack Weinberg!
1700
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001701- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1702 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1703 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1704 type. This has been fixed now.
1705
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001706- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1707 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1708 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1709
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001710- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1711 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1712 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1713 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1714 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1715 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1716 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1717 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001718 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001719
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001720- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1721 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1722 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001723
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001724- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1725 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1726 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1727 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1728 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1729 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1730 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1731 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001732 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001733 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1734 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1735
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001736- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1737 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1738 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1739 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1740 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1741 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1742 this.)
1743
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001744- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1745 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001746 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001747 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001748 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1749 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001750 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1751 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001752
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001753- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1754 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1755 currently running.
1756
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001757- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1758 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1759 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1760 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1761
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001762- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1763 as directory names.
1764
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001765- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1766 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1767
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001768- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1769 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1770
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001771- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001772 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1773 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001774
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001775- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1776 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1777 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1778 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1779 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1780
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001781- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1782 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1783 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1784 removed.
1785
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001786- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1787 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1788 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1789
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001790- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1791 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1792 to __debug__.
1793
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001794- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1795 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1796 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1797
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001798- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1799 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1800 deprecated now.
1801
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001802- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1803 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1804 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001805
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001806- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1807 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1808 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1809 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1810 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001811
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001812- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1813 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1814
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001815- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1816 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1817 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001818 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001819 is backward compatible.
1820
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001821- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1822 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1823 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1824 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1825 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1826
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001827- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1828 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1829 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1830 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1831 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1832 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001833
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001834- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1835 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1836
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001837- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1838 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1839
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001840- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1841 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1842 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1843 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1844 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1845
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001846- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1847 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1848 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1849
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001850- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001851 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1852
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001853- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1854 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1855 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001856
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001857- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1858 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1859
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001860- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1861 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1862 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1863
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001864- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1865
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001866Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001867-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001868
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001869- Added three operators to the operator module:
1870 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1871 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1872 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1873
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001874- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1875
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001876- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1877 archives.
1878
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001879- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1880 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1881 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1882
1883 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1884
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001885- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1886 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1887 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001888 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001889
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001890- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1891 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1892 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1893 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001894 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1895 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1896 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1897 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001898
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001899- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1900 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001901
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001902- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1903
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001904- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1905 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1906
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001907- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1908 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1909 supported.
1910
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001911- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1912
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001913- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1914 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001915
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001916- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1917 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1918
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001919- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1920
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001921- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1922 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1923
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001924- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1925 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1926 functions but callable type objects.
1927
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001928- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001929 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001930 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001931
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001932- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1933 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001934
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001935- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1936 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001937
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001938- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1939 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1940 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1941 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1942
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001943- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1944 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001945
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001946- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1947 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1948 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1949 and __imul__.
1950
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001951- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001952 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1953 is called.
1954
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001955- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1956 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1957 interpreter was compiled.
1958
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001959- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1960 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1961 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001962 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001963 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1964 1, not 2.
1965
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001966- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1967 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1968 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1969 limit.
1970
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001971- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1972 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1973 bug #623464.
1974
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001975- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1976 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1977 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1978 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1979
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001980Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001981-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001982
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001983- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1984
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001985- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1986 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1987 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1988 with Python 2.3a2.
1989
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001990- os.path exposes getctime.
1991
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001992- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001993 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001994 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001995 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001996 unit tests of floating point results.
1997
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001998- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1999 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2000 has been increased.
2001
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002002- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2003 executed.
2004
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002005- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2006 postinstallation script.
2007
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002008- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2009 test the current module.
2010
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002011- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002012 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2013 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2014 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2015 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2016
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002017- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002018 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002019 Ward's Optik package.
2020
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002021- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2022 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2023 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2024 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2025
2026- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2027 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002028 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002029
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002030- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2031 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2032 shelf are binary pickles.
2033
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002034- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2035 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2036
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002037- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2038 modules are iterators now.
2039
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002040- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2041 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2042 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2043 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2044 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2045 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002046
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002047- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2048 with their entity value.
2049
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002050- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2051
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002052- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2053 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002054
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002055- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2056 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002057 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002058
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002059- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2060 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2061 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2062 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2063 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2064 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2065 main():
2066
2067 import locale
2068 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2069
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002070- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2071 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2072
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002073- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2074 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2075 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2076 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2077 to the new standard.
2078
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002079- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2080 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2081 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2082 an extension to the database.
2083
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002084- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2085 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2086 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2087 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002088 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002089
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002090- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002091 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002092
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002093- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2094 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2095 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2096 bounded integers.
2097
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002098- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2099 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2100 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2101 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2102 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2103 in existence.
2104
2105 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2106 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2107 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2108 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2109 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2110 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2111
2112 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2113 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2114 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2115 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2116
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002117- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2118 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2119 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2120
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002121- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2122
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002123- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2124 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2125 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2126 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2127
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002128- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2129 argument.
2130
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002131- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2132 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2133 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2134 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2135 [SF patch 560794].
2136
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002137- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2138 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2139 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002140 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2141 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2142 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002143
2144- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2145 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002146
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002147- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2148 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2149 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2150 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002151
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002152- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2153 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2154 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2155 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2156 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2157
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002158- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002159
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002160- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2161
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002162- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2163 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2164 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2165 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2166 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2167 identical to None.
2168
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002169- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2170 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2171 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2172 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2173 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2174 results now.
2175
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002176- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2177 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2178
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002179- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2180 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2181 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2182 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2183 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2184 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2185 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2186 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2187
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002188- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2189
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002190- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2191 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2192
2193- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2194 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2195 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2196 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2197 and other systems.
2198
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002199- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2200 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2201 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2202 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 +00002203 work well with these.
2204
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002205- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2206
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002207- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002208 connections.
2209
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002210- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2211 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2212 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2213
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002214- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2215 sets
2216
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002217- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2218 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2219 name.
2220
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002221- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2222 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2223 passed in.
2224
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002225- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002226 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002227 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2228 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002229
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002230- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2231
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002232- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2233
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002234- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2235 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2236 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2237
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002238- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2239 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2240 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2241 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002242 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002243
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002244- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002245 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002246 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002247
2248- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2249 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2250 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2251
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002252- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002253 the value of its expression argument.
2254
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002255- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2256 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2257 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2258
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002259- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2260 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2261 skipstone browser was included.
2262
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002263- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2264 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2265
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002266Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002267-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002268
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002269- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2270 names in addition to accepting file names.
2271
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002272- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2273 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2274 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2275 still used and useful.)
2276
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002277- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2278 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2279 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2280 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002281
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002282- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2283 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2284 the generated binary.
2285
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002286Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002287-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002288
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002289- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2290
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002291- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2292 except in the hands of experts.
2293
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002294- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002295 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2296 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2297 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002298
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002299- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2300 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2301 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2302 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2303 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2304 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2305 builds.
2306
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002307- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2308 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2309 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2310 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2311 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2312 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2313 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2314 new type.
2315
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002316- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002317
2318 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2319 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2320 positive infinities.
2321
2322 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2323 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2324 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2325 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2326 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2327 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2328 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2329
2330 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2331
2332 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2333
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002334- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2335 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2336 size of the executable.
2337
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002338- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2339 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2340 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2341 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002342
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002343- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2344
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002345- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2346 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2347 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002348
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002349- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2350 well as Unix.
2351
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002352- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2353 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2354 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2355 modules in the README file for details.
2356
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002357C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002358-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002359
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002360- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2361 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002362 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002363 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002364 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002365
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002366- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2367 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2368 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2369 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2370 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2371 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002372 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002373 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2374 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2375 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2376 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2377 aligned.)
2378
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002379- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2380 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2381 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2382
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002383- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2384 level.
2385
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002386- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2387 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2388 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2389 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2390 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2391
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002392- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2393 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2394 code.
2395
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002396- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2397 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2398 adjusting for negative indices.
2399
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002400- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2401 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2402 object.
2403
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002404- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2405 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2406 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2407
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002408- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2409 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002410
2411- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2412
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002413- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2414 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2415 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2416 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2417
2418- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2419
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002420- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002421
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002422- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002423 without going through the buffer API.
2424
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002425- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002426
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002427- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2428 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2429 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2430 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2431
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002432- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2433 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2434
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002435- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002436 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2437
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002438New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002439-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002440
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002441- OpenVMS is now supported.
2442
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002443- AtheOS is now supported.
2444
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002445- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2446
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002447- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2448
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002449Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002450-----
2451
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002452- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2453 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2454 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002455
2456Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002457-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002458
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002459- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2460 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2461 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2462 bugs.
2463 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002464 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002465 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2466 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002467 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002468
2469- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002470 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002471
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002472- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2473 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2474
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002475- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2476 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002477 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002478 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2479
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002480- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2481 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2482 use files" uninstall option).
2483
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002484- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2485
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002486- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2487 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2488
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002489- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2490 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2491 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2492
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002493- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2494 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2495 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2496 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2497 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002498 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2499 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2500 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002501
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002502- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002503 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002504 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2505 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2506 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2507 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2508 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2509 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2510 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2511 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2512 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2513 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2514 work around.
2515
2516- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2517 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2518 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2519 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2520 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2521 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2522 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2523 specified with O_CREAT too).
2524
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002525Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002526----
2527
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002528- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002529
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002530- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2531 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2532 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2533
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002534- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2535 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2536 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2537
2538- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2539 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2540 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2541 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2542 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2543 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2544 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2545 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002546
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002547- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2548 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2549 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002550
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002551- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2552 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2553 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2554 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2555 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002556
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002557- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2558 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2559 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002560
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002561- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2562 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002563
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002564- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2565 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2566 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2567 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2568 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002569
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002570- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2571 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2572 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2573
2574- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2575 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2576 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002577
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002578- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2579 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2580 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2581 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002582 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002583
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002584- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2585 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002586
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002587- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2588 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002589
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002590- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002591 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002592 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2593 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002594
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002595
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002596What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002597===============================
2598
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002599*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2600
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002601Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002602--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002603
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002604- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2605 with a custom metaclass.
2606
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002607Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002608-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002609
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002610- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2611 are proxies.
2612
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002613Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002614-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002615
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002616- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2617 very short strings.
2618
2619- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2620 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2621 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2622 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2623 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2624
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002625Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002626-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002627
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002628- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2629 close or delete time).
2630
2631- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2632 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2633
2634- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2635
2636- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002637 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002638
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002639Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002640-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002641
2642Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002643-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002644
2645C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002646-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002647
2648New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002649-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002650
2651Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002652-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002653
2654Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002655-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002656
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002657- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2658
2659- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2660 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2661
2662- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2663 deleted at process exit time.
2664
2665- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2666 in backslash.
2667
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002668Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002669----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002670
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002671- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2672 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2673 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2674
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002675
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002676What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002677===========================
2678
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002679*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2680
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002681Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002682--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002683
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002684- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2685 been extensively updated. See
2686
2687 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2688
2689 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2690
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002691- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2692 deleted!
2693
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002694- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2695 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2696 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2697 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2698 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2699
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002700- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2701
2702 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2703 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2704
2705 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2706 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2707 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2708 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2709 supported anyway.
2710
2711 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2712 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2713
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002714- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2715 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2716 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2717 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2718 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002719
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002720- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2721 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2722 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2723
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002724Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002725-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002726
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002727- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2728 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2729 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2730 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2731 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2732 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002733 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2734 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2735 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2736 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002737
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002738- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2739 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2740 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2741
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002742Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002743-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002744
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002745- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2746
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002747Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002748-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002749
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002750- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2751 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2752 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2753 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2754 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2755 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2756
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002757- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2758
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002759- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2760
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002761- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2762
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002763- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2764 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2765 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2766
2767- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2768
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002769Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002770-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002771
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002772- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2773 off a search on Google.
2774
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002775Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002776-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002777
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002778- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2779 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2780 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2781 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2782 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2783 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2784 other platforms should do likewise.
2785
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002786- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2787 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2788 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2789
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002790C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002791-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002792
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002793- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2794 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2795 producing key-value pairs.
2796
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002797- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002798 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002799 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2800 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2801 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2802 previously went unchallenged.
2803
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002804New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002805-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002806
2807Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002808-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002809
2810Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002811-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002812
2813Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002814----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002815
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002816- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2817 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002818
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002819- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2820 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2821 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2822 home.
2823
2824
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002825What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002826===========================
2827
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002828*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2829
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002830Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002831--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002832
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002833- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2834 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002835
2836 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002837 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002838
2839 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2840 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002841 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002842 This needs to be documented.
2843
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002844- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2845 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2846
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002847- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2848 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2849 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2850
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002851- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2852 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2853
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002854- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2855 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2856 class forbids it).
2857
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002858- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2859 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2860 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2861
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002862- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2863
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002864Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002865-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002866
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002867- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2868 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002869 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002870
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002871- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2872 (like 1 + '').
2873
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002874Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002875-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002876
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002877- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2878 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2879 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2880 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002881 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002882 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2883
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002884- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2885 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2886 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2887 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2888
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002889- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2890 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002891 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2892 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2893 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002894
2895- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2896 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002897
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002898- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2899 bytes on its input.
2900
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002901Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002902-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002903
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002904- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002905 convenience function.
2906
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002907- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2908 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2909 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002910 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2911 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2912 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2913 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2914 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2915 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002916
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002917- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2918 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2919 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2920 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2921
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002922- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2923 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2924 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2925
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002926- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2927 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2928 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2929 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2930
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002931- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2932 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002933 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002934 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2935 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2936 new -l and -e options.
2937
2938- statcache is now deprecated.
2939
2940- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2941 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002942 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002943 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2944 time properly taken into account.
2945
2946- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2947 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2948 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2949 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2950
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002951Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002952-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002953
2954Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002955-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002956
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002957- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2958 is built with libdb3 if available.
2959
2960- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2961
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002962C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002963-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002964
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002965- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2966 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2967 PySequence_Size().
2968
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002969- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2970
2971- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2972 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2973 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2974
2975- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2976 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2977
2978- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2979 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2980
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002981New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002982-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002983
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002984- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2985 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2986
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002987- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2988 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2989
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002990- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2991
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002992Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002993-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002994
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002995- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2996 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2997
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002998Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002999-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003000
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003001Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003002----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003003
3004- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3005 removed completely in the next release.
3006
3007- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3008 OSX.
3009
3010- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3011 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3012
3013- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3014
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003015
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003016What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003017===========================
3018
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003019*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3020
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003021Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003022--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003023
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003024- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003025 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003026 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003027 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3028 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003029 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3030 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003031 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3032 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003033
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003034- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3035 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3036
3037- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3038 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3039
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003040Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003041-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003042
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003043- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3044 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3045 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3046 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3047 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3048 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3049 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3050 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3051
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003052- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3053 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3054 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3055 example).
3056
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003057- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003058 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003059 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003060 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003061
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003062- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3063 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3064 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003065 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003066
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003067- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3068 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3069 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3070 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3071 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3072 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3073
3074 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3075
3076 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3077
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003078Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003079-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003080
3081- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3082
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003083- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3084
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003085- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3086 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003087
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003088- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3089 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3090 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3091 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3092 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3093 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003094 attributes.
3095
3096- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3097 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3098 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003099
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003100- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3101 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3102 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003103
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003104- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3105 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3106 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003107 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3108 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3109
3110- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3111 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003112
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003113Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003114-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003115
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003116- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3117 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3118
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003119- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3120 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3121 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3122 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3123
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003124- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3125 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3126 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3127 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3128
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003129 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3130 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3131 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3132 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3133 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3134 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3135 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3136 without losing information).
3137
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003138- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003139 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3140 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3141 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3142 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3143 module).
3144
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003145 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003146 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3147 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3148 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3149 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003150
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003151- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003152 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3153 encoding.
3154
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003155- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3156 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3157
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003158- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003159 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3160
3161- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3162 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3163 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3164 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3165
3166- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3167
3168- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3169 ON, and OFF.
3170
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003171- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3172 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3173
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003174Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003175-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003176
3177- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3178 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3179 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003180
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003181- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3182 been added: -X and -E.
3183
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003184Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003185-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003186
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003187- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3188 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3189
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003190C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003191-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003192
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003193- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3194 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3195 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3196 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3197 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3198
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003199- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3200 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3201 as long) arguments.
3202
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003203- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3204 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3205 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3206 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3207 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3208 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3209
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003210- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3211 input.
3212
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003213New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003214-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003215
3216Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003217-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003218
3219Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003220-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003221
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003222- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3223 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3224 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3225
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003226- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3227 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3228 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003229 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003230
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003231 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3232 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3233 import signal
3234 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003235
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003236 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003237 while 1:
3238 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003239 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003240 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3241 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3242 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3243 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003244
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003245
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003246What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3247===========================
3248
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003249*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3250
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003251Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003252--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003253
3254- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3255 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3256 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3257
3258- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3259 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3260 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3261 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3262 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3263 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3264 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003265
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003266- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003267 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003268 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3269 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3270 associate a docstring with a property.
3271
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003272- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3273 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3274 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3275 other built-in object types.
3276
3277- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3278 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3279 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3280 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3281 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3282
3283- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3284 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3285
3286- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3287 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003288 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003289 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3290 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3291 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3292 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3293 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3294
3295- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3296 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3297 class.
3298
3299- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3300 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3301 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3302 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3303
3304- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3305 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3306 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3307 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3308
3309- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3310 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3311
3312- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3313 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3314 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3315 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3316 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003317 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003318 with the same value as s.
3319
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003320- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3321
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003322Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003323----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003324
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003325- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3326
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003327- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3328 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3329 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3330 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3331 objects.
3332
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003333- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3334 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003335 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3336 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3337
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003338- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3339 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3340 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3341
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003342Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003343-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003344
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003345- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3346 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3347 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3348 by the instances.
3349
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003350- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3351 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3352 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3353
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003354- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3355 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3356 before the entire comparison is complete.
3357
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003358- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3359 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3360 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3361
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003362- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3363 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3364 getwriter().
3365
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003366- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3367 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3368
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003369- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003370 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3371 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3372
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003373- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3374 iterable object.
3375
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003376- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3377 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003378
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003379- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3380 authentication.
3381
3382- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3383 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003384
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003385- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003386 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3387 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3388 a sample driver.)
3389
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003390Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003391-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003392
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003393- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3394 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3395 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3396 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3397 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3398 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3399 kernel has large file support.
3400
3401- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3402 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3403 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3404 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3405 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3406
3407- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3408 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3409 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3410
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003411C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003412-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003413
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003414- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3415 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3416
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003417New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003418-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003419
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003420- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3421 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3422
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003423Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003424-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003425
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003426- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3427 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3428 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3429 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3430 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3431
3432- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3433 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3434 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3435 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3436
3437- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3438 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3439
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003440Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003441-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003442
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003443- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003444 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3445 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003446
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003447
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003448What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3449===========================
3450
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003451*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3452
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003453Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003454----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003455
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003456- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3457 big to represent as a C double.
3458
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003459- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3460 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3461 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3462 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3463 restriction).
3464
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003465- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3466 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3467 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3468 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3469 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3470
3471 >>> dir([])
3472 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3473 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3474 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3475 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3476 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3477 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3478 'reverse', 'sort']
3479
3480 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3481
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003482- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003483 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3484 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3485 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3486 OverflowError exception.
3487
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003488- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003489 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003490 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3491 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3492 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3493 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3494 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003495 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003496 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3497 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3498
3499 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3500 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3501 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3502 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003503
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003504- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003505 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3506 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3507 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3508 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3509 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3510 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3511 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3512 once it is created.
3513
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003514- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3515 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3516 (key, value) pairs.
3517
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003518- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003519 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3520 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3521
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003522- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3523 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3524 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3525 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3526 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003527
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003528- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003529 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3530 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3531
3532 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3533
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003534- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003535 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3536
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003537Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003538-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003539
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003540- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003541 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3542 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003543
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003544- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3545 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3546 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3547 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3548 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3549 in this area anymore).
3550
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003551- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3552 threading.Timer.
3553
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003554- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3555 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3556
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003557- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003558 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3559
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003560- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003561 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3562 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3563 converted to Python longs.
3564
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003565- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003566 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3567
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003568- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3569 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3570 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3571
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003572Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003573-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003574
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003575- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3576 division operators as per PEP 238.
3577
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003578Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003579-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003580
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003581- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3582 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3583 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3584 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3585
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003586C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003587-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003588
3589- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003590
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003591- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3592 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003593 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003594
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003595 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3596 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003597 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003598 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003599
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003600- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003601 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3602 module:
3603
3604 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003605
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003606 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3607 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003608
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003609 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3610 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003611
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003612 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3613
3614 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3615
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003616- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003617 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3618 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3619 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003620
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003621New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003622-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003623
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003624- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3625 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3626 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3627 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3628 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003629
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003630Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003631-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003632
3633Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003634-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003635
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003636- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3637 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3638 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3639 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003640 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3641 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3642 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3643 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3644 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003645
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003646- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003647 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3648
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003649
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003650What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3651===========================
3652
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003653*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3654
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003655Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003656-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003657
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003658- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3659 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3660
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003661- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3662 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3663 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003664
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003665- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3666 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3667 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3668 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003669
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003670- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3671
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003672- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003673
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003674Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003675-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003676
3677- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003678 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003679 the module docstring for details.
3680
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003681Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003682-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003683
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003684- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003685 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3686 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3687 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003688
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003689- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3690 Nick Mathewson.
3691
3692Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003693----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003694
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003695- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3696 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3697 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3698 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3699 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3700 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3701 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3702 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3703
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003704- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3705 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3706 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3707 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3708
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003709- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3710 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3711 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3712 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3713 come a long way).
3714
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003715- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3716 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3717 write filters for these warnings).
3718
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003719- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3720 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3721 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3722 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3723 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3724
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003725- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3726 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3727 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3728 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3729 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3730 older distribution.
3731
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003732Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003733-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003734
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003735- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3736 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003737 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003738
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003739- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3740 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3741 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3742
3743- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3744
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003745- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3746
3747- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3748
3749- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3750
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003751- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003752
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003753- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3754
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003755New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003756-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003757
3758C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003759-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003760
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003761- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3762 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3763 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3764 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3765 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3766 against buffer overruns.
3767
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003768- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003769 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3770 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003771 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3772 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3773 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3774
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003775- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3776 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3777 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3778 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3779 deprecated.
3780
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003781Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003782-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003783
3784- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3785 relevant is found.
3786
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003787
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003788What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003789===========================
3790
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003791*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3792
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003793Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003794----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003795
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003796- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3797 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3798 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3799 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3800 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3801 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3802 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3803 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003804 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003805 repaired.
3806
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003807- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003808 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003809 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3810 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3811 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3812 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3813 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3814 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3815 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3816 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3817
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003818- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3819 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3820 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3821 leading BMO character).
3822
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003823- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3824 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3825 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3826
3827 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3828 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3829 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003830
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003831 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3832 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3833 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3834 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3835 for various simple to use conversions.
3836
3837 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3838 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3839
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003840 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3841 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3842 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3843 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3844 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3845 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3846 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3847 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3848 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3849 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3850 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3851 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3852 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3853 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3854 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003855
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003856- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3857 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3858 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003859 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003860 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003861
3862 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003863 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3864 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3865 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3866 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3867 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003868 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3869 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003870
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003871 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3872 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3873 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003874 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003875
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003876- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3877 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3878 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3879 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3880 floating arithmetic,
3881
3882 x = 9007199254740992.0
3883 print long(x)
3884
3885 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3886 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3887 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3888 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3889 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3890 functions are of good quality).
3891
3892 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3893 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3894 algorithms to break.
3895
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003896- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3897 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3898 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3899 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3900 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3901 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3902 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3903 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3904 order.
3905
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003906- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3907 operation along the most common code paths.
3908
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003909- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3910 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3911
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003912- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3913 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3914 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3915 {}.update(UserDict())
3916
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003917- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3918 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3919 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3920 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3921 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3922 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3923 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3924 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3925
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003926- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003927 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003928
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003929 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003930 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3931 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003932 join() method of strings
3933 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003934 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3935 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003936 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003937 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003938
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003939- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3940 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3941
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003942- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3943 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3944
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003945- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3946 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3947 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3948 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3949
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003950- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3951 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003952 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003953 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3954 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003955
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003956- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3957
3958
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003959Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003960-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003961
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003962- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003963 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003964 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3965 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3966
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003967- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3968 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3969
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003970- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3971 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3972 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3973 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3974
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003975- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3976 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3977 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3978
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003979- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3980
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003981- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3982
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003983- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3984 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3985 that are still imported into string.py).
3986
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003987- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3988
3989- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3990 Now it does.
3991
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003992- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3993
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003994- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3995 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3996 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3997 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3998 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003999 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4000 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004001
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004002- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4003 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4004 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4005 'help(object)'.
4006
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004007Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004008-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004009
4010- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004011 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004012 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4013 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4014
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004015- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004016 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4017 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004018
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004019C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004020-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004021
4022- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4023 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004024
4025----
4026
4027**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**