blob: ffeb29b02cc9cfb37f2623a0ce6429866f864798 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000013- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
14 list.sort().
15
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000016
17Extension Modules
18-----------------
19
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000020- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
21 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
22 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
23
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000024
25Library
26-------
27
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +000028- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
29
Raymond Hettingerc7979f12004-12-05 11:38:18 +000030- the deprecated tzparse module was removed.
31
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +000032- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
33
Raymond Hettinger4ebe3642004-12-05 04:55:14 +000034- the depecated statcache module was removed.
35
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +000036- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
37
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +000038- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
39
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +000040- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
41
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +000042- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
43 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
44 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
45
Raymond Hettinger784ab762004-12-04 10:50:51 +000046- the deprecated whrandom module was removed. Use the random module instead.
47
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000048- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000049 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000050
51
52Build
53-----
54
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +000055- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
56 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
57 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
58 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
59 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
60 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
61 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
62 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
63
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000064
65C API
66-----
67
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +000068- Removed PyRange_New().
69
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000070
71Tests
72-----
73
74
75Mac
76---
77
78
79
80Tools/Demos
81-----------
82
83
84
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +000085What's New in Python 2.4 final?
86===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +000087
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +000088*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +000089
90Core and builtins
91-----------------
92
93- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
94 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
95 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
96
97
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +000098What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
99==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000100
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000101*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000102
103Core and builtins
104-----------------
105
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000106- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
107 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
108 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
109
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000110
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000111Library
112-------
113
114- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
115 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
116 raised is re-raised.
117
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000118- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
119 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
120
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000121- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
122 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
123 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
124 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
125 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
126 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
127 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
128 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
129 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
130 by the slice are recomputed now.
131
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000132- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000133
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000134Build
135-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000136
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000137- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
138 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
139 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000140
141C API
142-----
143
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000144- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
145
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000146
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000147What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
148================================
149
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000150*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000151
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000152License
153-------
154
155The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
156is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
157changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
158Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
159intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
160durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
161the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
162License::
163
164 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
165
166says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
167to Python 2.1.1.
168
169The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
170License Version 2.
171
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000172Core and builtins
173-----------------
174
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000175- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
176 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
177 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
178 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
179 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
180 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
181 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
182 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
183 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
184 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
185
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000186- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000187
188Extension Modules
189-----------------
190
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000191- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
192 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
193 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
194 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000195
196Library
197-------
198
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000199- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
200 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
201 returned.
202
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000203- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
204
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000205- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
206 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
207
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000208- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
209
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000210- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
211 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000212
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000213- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
214
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000215- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
216
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000217- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000218 the source code is updated and reloaded.
219
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000220Build
221-----
222
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000223- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000224
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000225What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
226================================
227
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000228*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000229
230Core and builtins
231-----------------
232
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000233- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000234 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
235
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000236- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
237 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
238 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
239 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
240
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000241- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
242 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
243
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000244- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
245 constant.
246
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000247- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
248 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
249 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
250 large), and to anomalies such as
251 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
252 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
253 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
254 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000255
256Extension modules
257-----------------
258
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000259- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
260 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000261 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
262 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
263 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000264
265Library
266-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000267
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000268- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000269 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000270 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
271 --swig-cpp.
272
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000273- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
274 it is set.
275
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000276- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000277
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000278- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
279 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
280 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
281 Closes bug #1039270.
282
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000283- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000284
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000285 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000286 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
287 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
288 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
289 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
290 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
291 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
292 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
293 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
294 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
295 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
296 + Updates to documentation.
297
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000298- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
299 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
300 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
301 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
302
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000303- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000304
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000305- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
306 applications should use the getmember function.
307
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000308- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
309
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000310- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
311 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
312 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
313 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
314 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
315 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
316 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
317 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
318 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
319
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000320- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
321 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000322 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000323
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000324- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
325 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
326 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
327 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
328 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
329 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
330 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
331 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000332
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000333- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
334 the new public features (of which there are many).
335
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000336- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000337 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
338 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
339 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
340 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000341 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000342
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000343- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
344
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000345- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
346 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
347 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
348 options.
349
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000350- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
351 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
352 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
353 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
354 conditions under which non-string values work.
355
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000356Build
357-----
358
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000359- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
360 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
361 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
362
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000363- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
364 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
365 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
366 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
367 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000368
369C API
370-----
371
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000372- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
373 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
374
375- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
376
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000377- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
378 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
379 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
380 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
381 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
382 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
383 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
384 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
385 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
386
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000387- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
388
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000389- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
390 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
391 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000392
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000393Tests
394-----
395
396- test__locale ported to unittest
397
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000398Mac
399---
400
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000401- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
402 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
403 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000404
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000405Tools/Demos
406-----------
407
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000408- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
409 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
410 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
411 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
412 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000413
414
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000415What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
416=================================
417
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000418*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000419
420Core and builtins
421-----------------
422
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000423- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000424 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
425
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000426- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
427 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
428 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
429 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
430 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
431 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
432 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
433 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000434 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
435 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
436 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
437 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
438 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000439
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000440- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
441 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
442 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
443 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
444 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
445
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000446- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
447
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000448- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
449 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
450
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000451- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
452 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
453 modified the list.
454
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000455- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
456 functions is now writable.
457
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000458- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
459 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
460 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
461 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
462
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000463- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
464 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
465 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
466 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
467 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000468
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000469- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
470 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
471
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000472Extension modules
473-----------------
474
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000475- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
476
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000477- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
478 data.
479
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000480- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
481 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
482 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
483 supposed to have been truncated away.
484
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000485- Added socket.socketpair().
486
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000487- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
488 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
489
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000490- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000491 versions of Python, have now been removed.
492
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000493Library
494-------
495
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000496- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000497 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000498
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000499- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
500 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
501
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000502- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
503 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
504
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000505- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
506
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000507- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
508 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000509
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000510- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
511 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
512
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000513- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
514
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000515- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
516
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000517- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
518
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000519- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
520 Percivall.
521
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000522- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
523 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
524
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000525- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
526 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
527 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000528 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000529
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000530- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
531 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
532 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
533 and exponent.
534
535- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
536
537- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
538 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
539 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
540
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000541- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
542 to the readline module.
543
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000544- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000545 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
546 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000547
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000548- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
549 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
550 contains symlinks.
551
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000552- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
553 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
554
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000555- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
556 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
557 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
558
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000559- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
560 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
561 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
562 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
563 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
564 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
565 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
566 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
567 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
568 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
569 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
570 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
571 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
572
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000573- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
574
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000575Tools/Demos
576-----------
577
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000578- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
579 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
580
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000581- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
582
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000583Build
584-----
585
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000586- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
587 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
588 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
589 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
590 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
591 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
592 plans to do so.
593
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000594- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
595 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
596
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000597- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
598 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
599
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000600- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
601 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
602
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000603- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
604 GNU/k*BSD systems.
605
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000606- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
607 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
608
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000609C API
610-----
611
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000612..
613
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000614Documentation
615-------------
616
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000617- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
618 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
619
620- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
621 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
622 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000623
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000624New platforms
625-------------
626
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000627- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
628
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000629Tests
630-----
631
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000632..
633
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000634Windows
635-------
636
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000637- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
638 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
639 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
640 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
641 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
642 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
643 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
644 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
645 the problem.
646
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000647Mac
648---
649
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000650..
651
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000652
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000653What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
654=================================
655
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000656*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000657
658Core and builtins
659-----------------
660
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000661- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
662 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
663 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
664 sensitive code.
665
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000666- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000667 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000668
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000669 @staticmethod
670 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000671
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000672 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000673
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000674- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
675 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
676 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
677 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
678 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
679 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
680 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
681 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
682 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
683 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
684 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
685
686 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
687 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
688 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
689 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
690 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
691 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
692 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
693
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000694- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
695 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
696
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000697- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000698 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000699
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000700- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000701 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000702 which was missing for no apparent reason.
703
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000704- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000705 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
706 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
707
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000708- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
709 types that support garbage collection.
710
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000711- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
712
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000713- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
714 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
715 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
716 Jython.
717
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000718- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
719
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000720- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
721 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
722
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000723- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
724 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
725 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000726
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000727- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
728 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
729 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
730
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000731Extension modules
732-----------------
733
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000734- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
735
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000736Library
737-------
738
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000739- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
740 TIS-620
741
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000742- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
743 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
744 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
745 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
746 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
747 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
748 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
749 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
750 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
751 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
752
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000753- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
754
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000755- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
756 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
757 same as when the argument is omitted).
758 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
759
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000760- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
761
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000762- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
763 schemes are offered.
764
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000765- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
766
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000767- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
768 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
769 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
770
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000771- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
772
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000773- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
774 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
775
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000776- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
777 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
778 when dummy_threading is being used.
779
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000780- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
781 from a tarfile.
782
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000783- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000784 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000785
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000786- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
787 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
788 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
789 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
790
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000791- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
792 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
793
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000794- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
795 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
796 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
797 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
798 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
799 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
800 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
801 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
802 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
803 by some other method in progress).
804
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000805- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
806 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
807 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000808
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000809- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
810
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000811- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
812 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
813 AM Kuchling.
814
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000815- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
816 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
817 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
818
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000819- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
820 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
821 instead of unsigned.
822
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000823- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000824 no longer part of the public API.
825
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000826- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
827 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
828 string methods of the same name).
829
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000830- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000831 SF patch 945642.
832
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000833- doctest unittest integration improvements:
834
835 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
836
837 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
838 DocTestSuites.
839
840- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
841 that provide thread-local data.
842
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000843- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
844 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
845
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000846- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
847
848- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
849 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
850 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
851
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000852- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
853
854 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
855 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
856 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000857
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000858 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
859 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
860 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
861 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
862
863 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
864 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
865
866 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
867 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
868 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
869 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
870
871 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
872 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
873 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
874 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
875 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
876
877 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
878 wrapping help output.
879
880 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
881 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
882 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000883
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000884C API
885-----
886
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000887- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
888 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
889 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
890 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
891 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
892 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
893 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
894 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
895 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
896 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
897 its visible semantics have not changed.
898
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000899- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
900 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
901
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000902Documentation
903-------------
904
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000905- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000906
907 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000908 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000909
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000910 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000911
912 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
913
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000914- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000915
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000916Tests
917-----
918
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000919- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000920 platforms that use the Makefile.
921
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000922- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
923 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
924 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
925
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000926
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000927What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
928=================================
929
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000930*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000931
932Core and builtins
933-----------------
934
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000935- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
936 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
937 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
938 objects now (one object instead of three).
939
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000940- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
941 Windows DLLs.
942
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000943- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
944 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000945
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000946- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
947 a new .pyc magic.
948
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000949- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
950 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
951 be there.
952
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000953- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
954 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
955 the LC_NUMERIC category.
956
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000957- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
958 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
959 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
960
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000961- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
962
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000963- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
964 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
965 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000966
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000967- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
968 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
969
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000970- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
971
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000972- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000973 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000974
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000975- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
976
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000977- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
978
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000979- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
980 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
981
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000982- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
983 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
984 Fixes bug #858016 .
985
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000986- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
987 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
988 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
989
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000990- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
991 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
992 improves their performance (about 35%).
993
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000994- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
995 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
996 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
997
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000998- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
999 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1000 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1001 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1002
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001003- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1004 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1005 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1006 length is not known).
1007
1008- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1009 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001010 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1011 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001012 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1013
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001014- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1015 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1016
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001017- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1018 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1019 keyword arguments.
1020
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001021- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1022 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1023 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1024
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001025- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1026 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1027 cases.
1028
1029- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1030 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1031 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1032 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1033 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1034 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1035 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1036 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1037 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1038 a release build.
1039
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001040- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1041 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1042
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001043- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001044 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001045
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001046- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1047 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1048 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1049 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1050 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1051 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1052 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1053 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1054 destroyed.
1055
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001056- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1057 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1058 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1059 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1060 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1061 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1062 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1063 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1064
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001065- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1066 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1067 character other than a space.
1068
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001069- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1070 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1071 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1072 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1073 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1074 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1075 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1076 attributes with the same name.
1077
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001078- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1079 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1080 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1081 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1082 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1083 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1084 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1085 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1086 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1087 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1088 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1089 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1090 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1091 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001092
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001093- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1094 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1095 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1096 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1097 This has been repaired.
1098
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001099- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1100
1101- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1102
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001103- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1104 over a sequence.
1105
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001106- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001107 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001108
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001109- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1110
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001111- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1112 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1113 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1114 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1115 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1116 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1117 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1118 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1119
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001120- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1121 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1122 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1123
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001124- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1125 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1126 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1127 freelist.
1128
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001129- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1130 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1131
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001132- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1133 number.
1134
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001135- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1136 a TypeError exception.
1137
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001138- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1139 820195.
1140
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001141- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1142 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1143 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1144
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001145- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001146 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1147 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001148
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001149- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1150 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1151 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1152
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001153- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1154 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001155 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001156
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001157- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001158 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1159 the first call.
1160
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001161
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001162Extension modules
1163-----------------
1164
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001165- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1166 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1167
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001168- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1169 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1170 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1171 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1172 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1173 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1174 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001175
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001176- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1177
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001178- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1179
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001180- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1181 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1182
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001183- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1184 fewer false positives.
1185
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001186- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1187 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1188
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001189- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001190 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1191
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001192- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001193 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001194 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001195 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1196 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001197
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001198- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1199 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1200 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1201 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1202
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001203- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1204 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1205 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1206 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1207 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1208 #897625.
1209
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001210- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1211 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1212
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001213- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1214 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1215 and pops on either side of the deque.
1216
1217- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1218 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1219
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001220- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1221 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1222 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1223 other functions that expect a function argument.
1224
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001225- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1226
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001227- os.getsid was added.
1228
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001229- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1230 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1231 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1232
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001233- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1234
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001235- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1236
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001237- readline.clear_history was added.
1238
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001239- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1240
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001241- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1242
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001243- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1244
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001245- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1246
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001247- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1248
1249- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1250
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001251- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1252
1253- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1254
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001255- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1256 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1257 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1258
1259- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1260 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1261 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1262 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1263 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1264 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1265 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1266
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001267- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1268 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1269 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1270 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001271
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001272- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001273 iterators from a single iterable.
1274
1275- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1276 of raising a TypeError exception.
1277
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001278- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1279 as parameter.
1280
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001281Library
1282-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001283
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001284- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1285 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1286 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001287
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001288- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1289 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1290 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001291
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001292- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001293
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001294- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1295 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001296
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001297- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1298 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1299
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001300- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1301
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001302- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001303 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001304
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001305- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001306 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001307
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001308- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1309
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001310- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1311 on cygwin and mingw32.
1312
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001313- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1314
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001315- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1316 module.
1317
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001318- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1319 installation scheme for all platforms.
1320
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001321- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001322 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001323
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001324- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1325 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1326 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1327
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001328- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1329 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1330 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1331
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001332- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1333
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001334- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1335
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001336- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1337 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1338
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001339- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1340 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1341 type pattern with the same value exists.
1342
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001343- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1344 when run from the command prompt).
1345
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001346- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1347 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1348
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001349- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1350 default sort).
1351
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001352- Added global runctx function to profile module
1353
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001354- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1355
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001356- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1357
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001358- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1359
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001360- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001361 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1362 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1363 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1364 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1365 accordingly.
1366
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001367- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1368 decoding standards.
1369
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001370- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1371 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1372 called for all requests.
1373
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001374- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1375 they are passed to the compiler.
1376
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001377- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1378 indent, width and depth.
1379
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001380- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1381 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1382
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001383- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1384 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1385
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001386- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1387
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001388- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1389
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001390- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1391
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001392- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1393 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1394
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001395- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001396 for better performance.
1397
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001398- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001399
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001400- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1401 a string).
1402
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001403- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1404
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001405- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1406
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001407- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1408
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001409- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1410
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001411- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1412 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1413 list of fieldnames.
1414
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001415- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1416 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1417
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001418- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1419
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001420- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1421 empty lists.
1422
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001423- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1424 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1425 and shelves.
1426
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001427- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1428 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1429
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001430- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001431 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1432 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001433
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001434- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1435 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001436 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001437
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001438- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001439 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1440 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1441
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001442- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1443 and removed in Py2.4.
1444
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001445- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1446
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001447- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1448
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001449Tools/Demos
1450-----------
1451
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001452- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1453 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1454
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001455- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1456
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001457- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1458 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1459 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1460 destination in situations where both files are given.
1461
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001462- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1463 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1464 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1465 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1466
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001467- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1468
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001469- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1470 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1471 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1472 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1473 now.
1474
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001475- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1476 in effect
1477
1478- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1479 C-c C-h
1480
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001481- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1482 -d option was given.
1483
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001484Build
1485-----
1486
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001487- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1488 build under OS X.
1489
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001490- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1491 --enable-profiling.
1492
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001493- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1494 is configured --with-tsc.
1495
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001496- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1497 on AMD64.
1498
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001499- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1500 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1501
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001502- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1503 removed.
1504
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001505- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1506 supported (see PEP 11).
1507
1508- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1509
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001510- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1511
1512- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1513 (see PEP 11).
1514
1515- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1516 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1517
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001518C API
1519-----
1520
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001521- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1522 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1523 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1524
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001525- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1526 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1527 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1528 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1529
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001530- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1531 generator objects.
1532
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001533- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1534 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001535 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1536 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001537
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001538- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1539 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1540
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001541- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1542 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1543 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1544 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1545 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1546
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001547- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1548 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1549 about 10% faster.
1550
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001551- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1552 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1553
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001554- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1555 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1556 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1557 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1558
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001559Windows
1560-------
1561
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001562- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1563 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1564 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1565 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1566
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001567- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1568 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1569 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1570
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001571
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001572What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1573===============================
1574
1575*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1576
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001577IDLE
1578----
1579
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001580- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1581 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1582 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1583 context-menu actions.
1584
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001585- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1586 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1587 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1588 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1589 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1590 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1591 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1592 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1593 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1594
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001595
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001596What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1597=============================================
1598
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001599*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001600
1601Core and builtins
1602-----------------
1603
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001604- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001605 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001606 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1607
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001608Extension modules
1609-----------------
1610
1611- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1612 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1613 than once. This has been fixed.
1614
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001615- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1616 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1617 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1618 call.
1619
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001620- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1621
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001622Library
1623-------
1624
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001625- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1626 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1627
1628- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1629 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1630 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1631 restored.
1632
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001633IDLE
1634----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001635
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001636- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001637
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001638Build
1639-----
1640
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001641- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1642 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1643
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001644C API
1645-----
1646
1647Windows
1648-------
1649
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001650- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1651 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1652
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001653- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1654
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001655Mac
1656---
1657
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001658- Various fixes to pimp.
1659
1660- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1661
1662- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1663 more problems than it solves.
1664
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001665
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001666What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1667=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001668
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001669*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1670
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001671Core and builtins
1672-----------------
1673
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001674- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1675 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1676
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001677- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1678 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001679 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001680
1681- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1682 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1683 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001684 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001685
1686- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1687 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001688
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001689- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1690 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1691 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1692
1693- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001694 770247.
1695
1696- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001697
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001698Extension modules
1699-----------------
1700
1701- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1702 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1703
1704- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1705
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001706- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1707
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001708- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1709 contained within the _strptime module.
1710
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001711- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1712 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1713
1714- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001715 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1716
1717- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1718 the find_class attribute, if present.
1719
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001720- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001721
1722 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1723 (SF bug 763298).
1724
1725 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001726 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1727 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1728 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001729
1730 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1731
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001732Library
1733-------
1734
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001735- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1736
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001737- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1738 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1739 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1740 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1741 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1742 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1743 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1744 or Tester().
1745
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001746- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1747 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1748 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1749 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1750 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1751 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1752 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1753 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1754 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001755
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001756 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001757
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001758- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1759 weren't before was an oversight.
1760
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001761- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1762 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1763
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001764- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1765 when there are no lines.
1766
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001767- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1768 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1769
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001770- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1771 to child processes.
1772
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001773- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1774
1775- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1776
1777- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1778 xmlrpclib.
1779
1780- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1781 responses.
1782
1783- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1784 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1785
1786- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1787 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1788 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1789
1790- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1791 used as patterns.
1792
1793- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1794 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1795 than Tk 8.3.
1796
1797- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1798
1799- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001800
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001801Tools/Demos
1802-----------
1803
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001804- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1805
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001806- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1807
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001808- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001809
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001810Build
1811-----
1812
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001813- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1814
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001815- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1816
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001817- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1818 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001819
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001820- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1821 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1822 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001823
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001824C API
1825-----
1826
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001827- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1828 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1829
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001830Windows
1831-------
1832
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001833- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1834 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1835 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1836 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1837 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1838 Python exception ::
1839
1840 thread.error: can't start new thread
1841
1842 is raised now.
1843
1844- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1845 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1846 instead of from DLL teardown.
1847
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001848Mac
1849---
1850
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001851- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001852 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001853 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1854 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1855 the executable in the bundle.
1856
1857- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001858
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001859- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1860
1861- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1862 on Panther.
1863
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001864What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1865================================
1866
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001867*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001868
1869Core and builtins
1870-----------------
1871
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001872- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1873 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1874 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1875 with the -i option.
1876
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001877- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1878 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1879
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001880- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1881 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1882
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001883- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1884 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1885 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1886 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1887 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1888 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1889 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1890 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1891 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1892 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1893 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1894 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1895 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001896
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001897- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1898 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1899 embedded in a lambda expression.
1900
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001901- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1902 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1903 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1904 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1905 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1906
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001907- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1908 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1909 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1910
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001911- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1912 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1913
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001914- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1915 It's writable again.
1916
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001917- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1918 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1919 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001920 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001921
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001922- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1923 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1924 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1925
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001926Extension modules
1927-----------------
1928
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001929- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1930 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1931
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001932- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1933 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1934 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1935 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1936
1937- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1938 collection.
1939
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001940- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1941 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1942 unique within a single program run.
1943
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001944- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1945 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1946
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001947- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1948 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1949
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001950- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1951 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001952
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001953- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1954
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001955- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1956 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1957
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001958- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1959 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1960 for many BSD-derived systems.
1961
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001962
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001963Library
1964-------
1965
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001966- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1967 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1968 primary ones:
1969
1970 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1971 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1972 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1973
1974 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1975 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1976 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1977 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1978 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1979 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1980
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001981- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1982 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1983 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1984 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1985 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1986 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1987 argument.
1988
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001989- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1990 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1991 in the archive.
1992
1993- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1994 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1995
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001996- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1997 569574).
1998
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001999- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2000 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2001 no more.
2002
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002003- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2004 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2005 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2006 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2007 code coverage.
2008
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002009- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2010 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2011 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002012 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2013 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002014
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002015- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2016 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2017 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002018 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002019
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002020- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2021
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002022- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2023 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2024 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2025 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2026
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002027- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2028 handling.
2029
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002030- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2031 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2032
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002033- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2034 in socket.py.
2035
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002036- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2037
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002038- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2039 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2040 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2041 opener with proxy support.
2042
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002043- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2044
2045- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2046
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002047Tools/Demos
2048-----------
2049
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002050- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2051
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002052- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2053
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002054- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2055 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002056
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002057- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2058 files.
2059
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002060Build
2061-----
2062
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002063- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002064 different root directory.
2065
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002066C API
2067-----
2068
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002069- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2070 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2071 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2072 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2073 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2074 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2075 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2076 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2077 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2078 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2079
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002080- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2081 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2082 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2083 from Python.
2084
2085
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002086New platforms
2087-------------
2088
2089None this time.
2090
2091Tests
2092-----
2093
2094- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2095 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2096
2097Windows
2098-------
2099
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002100- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2101
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002102- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2103 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2104 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2105 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2106 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2107 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2108 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2109 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2110 that's what it's for.
2111
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002112Mac
2113---
2114
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002115- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2116 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2117 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2118 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002119- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2120 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2121- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002122
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002123SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2124------------------------------------
2125
2126430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2127598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2128622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2129661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2130683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2131697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2132713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2133724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2134727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2135729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2136730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2137731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2138732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2139733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2140735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2141740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2142744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2143745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2144747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2145749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2146751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2147753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2148755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2149757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2150760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2151
2152
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002153What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2154================================
2155
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002156*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002157
2158Core and builtins
2159-----------------
2160
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002161- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2162 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2163
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002164- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2165 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2166 and cannot be strings).
2167
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002168- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2169 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2170 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2171 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2172
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002173- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2174 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2175 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2176 Python itself.
2177
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002178- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2179 the referenced object, if it has one.
2180
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002181- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2182 the thread started at
2183 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2184
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002185- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2186 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2187 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2188 placed on a list index.
2189
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002190- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2191 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2192 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2193 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2194
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002195- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2196 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2197 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2198 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2199 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2200 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2201 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2202
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002203- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2204 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2205 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2206 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2207 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2208
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002209- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2210 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002211
2212- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2213 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2214 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2215 #693195.)
2216
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002217- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2218 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002219
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002220- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002221 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002222 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2223 interpreter executions, would fail.
2224
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002225- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002226 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002227 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002228
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002229Extension modules
2230-----------------
2231
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002232- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2233 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2234 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2235 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2236
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002237- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2238 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2239
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002240- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2241 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2242 and Greg Chapman.)
2243
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002244- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2245 recursively.
2246
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002247- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002248 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2249 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2250 leaks.
2251
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002252- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2253
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002254- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2255 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2256 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2257 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2258 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2259 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2260 #705836.
2261
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002262- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002263 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2264
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002265- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2266 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2267 See SF bug #692416.
2268
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002269- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2270 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2271
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002272- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2273 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2274 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002275
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002276- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002277 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2278 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2279
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002280- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2281 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2282 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2283 timeouts to work properly.
2284
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002285Library
2286-------
2287
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002288- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2289 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2290 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2291 future release.
2292
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002293- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2294 for querying platform dependent features.
2295
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002296- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002297
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002298- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2299 pickle protocol versions.
2300
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002301- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2302 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2303 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2304
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002305- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2306
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002307- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2308 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2309 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2310 modules.
2311
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002312- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2313 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2314 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2315
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002316- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2317 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2318
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002319- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2320 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2321 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2322
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002323- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002324 MS Office extensions.
2325
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002326- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2327 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2328
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002329- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2330 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2331
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002332- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2333 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2334 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2335 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2336 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2337 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2338
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002339- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2340 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2341 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002342
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002343- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2344 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2345 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2346
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002347- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2348
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002349- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2350 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2351 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2352
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002353Tools/Demos
2354-----------
2355
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002356- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2357 See the module docstring for details.
2358
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002359Build
2360-----
2361
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002362- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2363 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002364
2365C API
2366-----
2367
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002368- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2369
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002370- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2371 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2372 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2373
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002374- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2375 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002376
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002377 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2378 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2379 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002380
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002381- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002382 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2383
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002384- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2385 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2386 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002387
2388New platforms
2389-------------
2390
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002391None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002392
2393Tests
2394-----
2395
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002396- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2397 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002398
2399Windows
2400-------
2401
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002402- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2403 function.
2404
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002405- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2406 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002407
2408Mac
2409---
2410
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002411- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2412 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002413
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002414- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2415 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002416
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002417- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2418 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2419 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002420
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002421- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002422 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2423 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002424
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002425- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2426 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002427
2428
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002429What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2430=================================
2431
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002432*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002433
2434Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002435-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002436
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002437- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2438 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2439 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2440
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002441- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2442 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2443 (SF patch #664376.)
2444
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002445- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2446 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2447 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2448 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2449 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2450 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002451 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002452
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002453- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2454 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2455 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2456 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002457 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002458
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002459- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2460 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2461 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2462 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2463 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2464 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2465 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2466 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2467 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2468 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2469 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2470
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002471- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2472 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2473 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2474 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2475 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2476 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2477
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002478- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2479 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2480
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002481- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2482 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2483 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2484 case.)
2485
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002486- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2487 passed as unicode strings.
2488
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002489- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2490 See SF bug #683467.
2491
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002492- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2493 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2494
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002495- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2496
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002497- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2498
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002499- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2500 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2501 arguments.
2502
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002503- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2504 See SF bug #667147.
2505
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002506- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002507 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002508 See SF bug #676155.
2509
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002510- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002511 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002512 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2513 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2514 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2515 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2516 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2517 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002518
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002519Extension modules
2520-----------------
2521
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002522- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2523 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2524 tp_as_number pointer.
2525
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002526- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2527 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2528 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2529 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2530 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2531
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002532- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2533
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002534- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2535
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002536- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002537 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002538 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2539 patch #678531.)
2540
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002541- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2542 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2543
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002544- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2545 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2546
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002547- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2548
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002549- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2550 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2551 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2552
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002553- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2554
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002555- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2556 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2557
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002558- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002559
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002560- datetime changes:
2561
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002562 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2563
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002564 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2565 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2566 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2567 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2568 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2569 now.
2570
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002571 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002572 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2573 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002574
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002575 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002576 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002577 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2578 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2579 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2580 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002581
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002582 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2583 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2584 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002585 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2586
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002587 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2588 by a later example coded by Guido.
2589
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002590 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002591 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2592 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2593 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002594 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2595 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2596
2597 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2598 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2599 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2600 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2601 tzinfo subclass instance.
2602
2603 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2604 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2605 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2606 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2607 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2608 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2609 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2610 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002611
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002612 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2613 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2614 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2615 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2616 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002617 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2618
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002619 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002620
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002621 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2622 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2623 as a naive datetime object.
2624
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002625 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2626 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2627 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2628
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002629 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2630 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2631 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2632 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2633 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2634 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2635 comparison.
2636
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002637 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2638 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2639 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2640 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002641 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002642
2643 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002644
2645 and ::
2646
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002647 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2648
2649 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2650 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2651 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2652 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2653
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002654 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2655 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2656 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2657 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2658 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2659
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002660 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2661 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002662 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2663 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002664
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002665Library
2666-------
2667
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002668- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2669 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2670
2671- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2672 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2673 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2674 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2675 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2676 See PEP 307 for details.
2677
2678- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2679 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2680
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002681- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2682 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002683 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002684 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2685 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002686 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002687
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002688- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2689 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2690
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002691- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2692 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2693 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2694
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002695- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2696
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002697- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2698 exception.
2699
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002700- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2701 class.
2702
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002703- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2704 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2705 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2706
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002707- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2708 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2709
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002710- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002711 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2712 See SF bug #659228.
2713
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002714- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2715 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2716 See SF patch #651082.
2717
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002718- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002719
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002720- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2721 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2722
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002723- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002724 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002725
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002726- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2727 DOS paths from other platforms.
2728
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002729Tools/Demos
2730-----------
2731
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002732- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2733 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2734 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2735 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2736 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2737 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2738 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2739 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2740 example:
2741
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002742 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2743 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002744
2745 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2746
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002747
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002748Build
2749-----
2750
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002751- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2752 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2753 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002754 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2755
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002756 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2757
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002758- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2759 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2760 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2761 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2762 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2763 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2764 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2765 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2766 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2767
2768- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2769 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2770 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2771 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2772
2773- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2774 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2775
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002776C API
2777-----
2778
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002779- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2780 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002781
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002782- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2783 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2784 tp_as_number pointer.
2785
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002786- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2787 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2788 (SF #681367)
2789
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002790- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2791 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2792 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2793 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002794
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002795Tests
2796-----
2797
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002798- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002799 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2800 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2801 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2802 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2803 pydoc.)
2804
2805- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2806
2807- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002808
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002809Windows
2810-------
2811
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002812- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2813 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2814 time).
2815
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002816- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2817 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2818
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002819- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2820 release without strong cryptography.
2821
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002822- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002823 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002824
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002825- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2826 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2827
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002828Mac
2829---
2830
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002831- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2832 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002833
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002834- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2835 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2836 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002837
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002838- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2839 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002840
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002841- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2842 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2843 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2844 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002845
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002846- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002847 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2848 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2849 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002850
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002851
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002852What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002853=================================
2854
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002855*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002856
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002857Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002858--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002859
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002860- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2861
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002862- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2863 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002864 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002865 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002866 a different meaning than before.
2867
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002868- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002869 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002870 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002871
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002872- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002873 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002874 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002875
2876- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2877 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2878 and deallocation.
2879
2880- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2881 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2882
2883- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2884 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2885 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2886 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2887 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2888
2889- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2890 now detected by the garbage collector.
2891
2892- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2893 [SF bug 519621]
2894
2895- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2896 identifier.
2897
2898- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2899 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2900 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2901 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2902 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2903 [SF bug 563060]
2904
2905- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2906 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2907 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2908 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2909 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2910
2911- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2912 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2913 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2914
2915- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2916
2917- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2918 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2919 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2920 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2921 state of the slots would be lost.)
2922
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002923Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002924-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002925
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002926- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002927 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2928 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2929 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2930 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002931 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2932 Jython 2.1.
2933
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002934- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002935 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002936 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2937 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2938 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2939 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2940 these, see PEP 302.
2941
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002942- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2943 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2944 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2945
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002946- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2947 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2948 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2949
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002950- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2951 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2952 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2953
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002954- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2955 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2956 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2957 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2958 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2959 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2960 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2961 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2962 releases or implementations.
2963
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002964- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002965 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2966 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002967
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002968- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2969 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2970
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002971- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2972 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2973 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2974
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002975- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2976 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2977
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002978- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2979 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002980 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2981 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002982
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002983- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2984 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2985 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2986 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2987 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2988
2989 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2990 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2991 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2992 pattern.
2993
2994 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2995 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2996 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2997 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2998
2999 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3000 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3001 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3002 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3003 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3004 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3005
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003006- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3007 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3008 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3009 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3010 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3011 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3012 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3013 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003014
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003015- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3016 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3017 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3018 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3019 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003020 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3021 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3022 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3023 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3024 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3025 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3026 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003027
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003028- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3029 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3030
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003031- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3032 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3033 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3034 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3035 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3036 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3037 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3038 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3039 to Zack Weinberg!
3040
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003041- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3042 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3043 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3044 type. This has been fixed now.
3045
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003046- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3047 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3048 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3049
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003050- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3051 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3052 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3053 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3054 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3055 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3056 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3057 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003058 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003059
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003060- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3061 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3062 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003063
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003064- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3065 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3066 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3067 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3068 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3069 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3070 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3071 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003072 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003073 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3074 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3075
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003076- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3077 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3078 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3079 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3080 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3081 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3082 this.)
3083
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003084- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3085 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003086 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003087 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003088 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3089 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003090 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3091 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003092
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003093- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3094 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3095 currently running.
3096
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003097- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3098 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3099 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3100 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3101
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003102- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3103 as directory names.
3104
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003105- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3106 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3107
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003108- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3109 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3110
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003111- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003112 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3113 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003114
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003115- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3116 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3117 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3118 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3119 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3120
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003121- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3122 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3123 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3124 removed.
3125
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003126- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3127 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3128 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3129
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003130- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3131 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3132 to __debug__.
3133
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003134- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3135 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3136 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3137
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003138- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3139 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3140 deprecated now.
3141
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003142- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3143 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3144 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003145
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003146- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3147 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3148 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3149 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3150 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003151
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003152- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3153 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3154
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003155- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3156 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3157 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003158 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003159 is backward compatible.
3160
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003161- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3162 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3163 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3164 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3165 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3166
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003167- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3168 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3169 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3170 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3171 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3172 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003173
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003174- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3175 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3176
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003177- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3178 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3179
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003180- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3181 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3182 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3183 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3184 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3185
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003186- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3187 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3188 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3189
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003190- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003191 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3192
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003193- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3194 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3195 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003196
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003197- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3198 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3199
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003200- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3201 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3202 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3203
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003204- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3205
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003206Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003207-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003208
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003209- Added three operators to the operator module:
3210 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3211 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3212 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3213
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003214- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3215
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003216- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3217 archives.
3218
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003219- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3220 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3221 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3222
3223 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3224
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003225- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3226 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3227 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003228 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003229
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003230- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3231 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3232 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3233 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003234 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3235 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3236 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3237 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003238
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003239- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3240 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003241
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003242- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3243
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003244- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3245 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3246
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003247- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3248 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3249 supported.
3250
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003251- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3252
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003253- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3254 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003255
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003256- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3257 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3258
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003259- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3260
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003261- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3262 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3263
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003264- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3265 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3266 functions but callable type objects.
3267
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003268- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003269 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003270 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003271
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003272- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3273 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003274
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003275- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3276 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003277
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003278- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3279 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3280 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3281 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3282
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003283- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3284 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003285
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003286- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3287 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3288 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3289 and __imul__.
3290
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003291- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003292 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3293 is called.
3294
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003295- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3296 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3297 interpreter was compiled.
3298
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003299- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3300 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3301 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003302 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003303 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3304 1, not 2.
3305
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003306- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3307 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3308 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3309 limit.
3310
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003311- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3312 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3313 bug #623464.
3314
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003315- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3316 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3317 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3318 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3319
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003320Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003321-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003322
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003323- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3324
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003325- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3326 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3327 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3328 with Python 2.3a2.
3329
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003330- os.path exposes getctime.
3331
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003332- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003333 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003334 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003335 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003336 unit tests of floating point results.
3337
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003338- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3339 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3340 has been increased.
3341
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003342- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3343 executed.
3344
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003345- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3346 postinstallation script.
3347
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003348- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3349 test the current module.
3350
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003351- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003352 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3353 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3354 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3355 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3356
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003357- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003358 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003359 Ward's Optik package.
3360
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003361- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3362 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3363 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3364 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3365
3366- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3367 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003368 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003369
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003370- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3371 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3372 shelf are binary pickles.
3373
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003374- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3375 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3376
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003377- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3378 modules are iterators now.
3379
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003380- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3381 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3382 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3383 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3384 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3385 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003386
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003387- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3388 with their entity value.
3389
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003390- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3391
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003392- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3393 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003394
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003395- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3396 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003397 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003398
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003399- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3400 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3401 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3402 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3403 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3404 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3405 main():
3406
3407 import locale
3408 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3409
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003410- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3411 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3412
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003413- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3414 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3415 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3416 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3417 to the new standard.
3418
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003419- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3420 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3421 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3422 an extension to the database.
3423
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003424- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3425 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3426 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3427 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003428 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003429
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003430- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003431 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003432
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003433- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3434 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3435 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3436 bounded integers.
3437
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003438- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3439 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3440 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3441 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3442 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3443 in existence.
3444
3445 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3446 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3447 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3448 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3449 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3450 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3451
3452 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3453 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3454 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3455 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3456
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003457- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3458 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3459 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3460
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003461- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3462
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003463- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3464 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3465 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3466 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3467
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003468- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3469 argument.
3470
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003471- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3472 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3473 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3474 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3475 [SF patch 560794].
3476
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003477- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3478 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3479 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003480 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3481 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3482 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003483
3484- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3485 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003486
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003487- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3488 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3489 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3490 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003491
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003492- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3493 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3494 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3495 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3496 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3497
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003498- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003499
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003500- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3501
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003502- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3503 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3504 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3505 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3506 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3507 identical to None.
3508
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003509- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3510 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3511 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3512 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3513 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3514 results now.
3515
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003516- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3517 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3518
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003519- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3520 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3521 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3522 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3523 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3524 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3525 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3526 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3527
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003528- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3529
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003530- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3531 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3532
3533- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3534 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3535 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3536 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3537 and other systems.
3538
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003539- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3540 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3541 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3542 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 +00003543 work well with these.
3544
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003545- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3546
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003547- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003548 connections.
3549
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003550- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3551 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3552 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3553
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003554- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3555 sets
3556
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003557- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3558 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3559 name.
3560
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003561- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3562 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3563 passed in.
3564
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003565- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003566 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003567 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3568 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003569
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003570- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3571
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003572- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3573
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003574- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3575 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3576 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3577
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003578- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3579 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3580 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3581 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003582 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003583
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003584- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003585 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003586 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003587
3588- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3589 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3590 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3591
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003592- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003593 the value of its expression argument.
3594
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003595- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3596 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3597 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3598
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003599- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3600 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3601 skipstone browser was included.
3602
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003603- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3604 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3605
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003606Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003607-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003608
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003609- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3610 names in addition to accepting file names.
3611
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003612- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3613 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3614 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3615 still used and useful.)
3616
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003617- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3618 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3619 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3620 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003621
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003622- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3623 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3624 the generated binary.
3625
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003626Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003627-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003628
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003629- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3630
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003631- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3632 except in the hands of experts.
3633
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003634- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003635 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3636 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3637 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003638
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003639- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3640 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3641 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3642 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3643 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3644 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3645 builds.
3646
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003647- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3648 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3649 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3650 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3651 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3652 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3653 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3654 new type.
3655
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003656- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003657
3658 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3659 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3660 positive infinities.
3661
3662 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3663 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3664 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3665 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3666 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3667 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3668 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3669
3670 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3671
3672 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3673
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003674- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3675 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3676 size of the executable.
3677
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003678- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3679 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3680 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3681 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003682
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003683- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3684
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003685- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3686 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3687 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003688
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003689- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3690 well as Unix.
3691
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003692- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3693 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3694 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3695 modules in the README file for details.
3696
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003697C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003698-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003699
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003700- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3701 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003702 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003703 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003704 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003705
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003706- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3707 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3708 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3709 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3710 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3711 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003712 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003713 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3714 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3715 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3716 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3717 aligned.)
3718
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003719- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3720 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3721 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3722
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003723- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3724 level.
3725
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003726- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3727 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3728 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3729 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3730 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3731
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003732- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3733 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3734 code.
3735
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003736- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3737 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3738 adjusting for negative indices.
3739
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003740- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3741 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3742 object.
3743
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003744- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3745 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3746 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3747
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003748- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3749 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003750
3751- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3752
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003753- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3754 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3755 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3756 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3757
3758- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3759
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003760- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003761
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003762- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003763 without going through the buffer API.
3764
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003765- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003766
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003767- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3768 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3769 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3770 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3771
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003772- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3773 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3774
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003775- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003776 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3777
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003778New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003779-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003780
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003781- OpenVMS is now supported.
3782
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003783- AtheOS is now supported.
3784
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003785- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3786
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003787- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3788
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003789Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003790-----
3791
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003792- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3793 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3794 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003795
3796Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003797-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003798
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003799- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3800 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3801 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3802 bugs.
3803 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003804 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003805 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3806 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003807 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003808
3809- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003810 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003811
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003812- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3813 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3814
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003815- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3816 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003817 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003818 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3819
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003820- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3821 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3822 use files" uninstall option).
3823
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003824- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3825
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003826- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3827 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3828
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003829- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3830 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3831 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3832
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003833- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3834 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3835 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3836 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3837 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003838 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3839 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3840 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003841
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003842- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003843 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003844 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3845 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3846 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3847 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3848 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3849 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3850 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3851 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3852 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3853 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3854 work around.
3855
3856- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3857 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3858 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3859 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3860 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3861 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3862 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3863 specified with O_CREAT too).
3864
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003865Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003866----
3867
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003868- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003869
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003870- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3871 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3872 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3873
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003874- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3875 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3876 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3877
3878- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3879 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3880 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3881 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3882 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3883 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3884 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3885 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003886
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003887- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3888 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3889 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003890
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003891- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3892 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3893 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3894 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3895 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003896
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003897- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3898 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3899 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003900
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003901- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3902 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003903
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003904- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3905 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3906 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3907 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3908 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003909
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003910- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3911 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3912 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3913
3914- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3915 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3916 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003917
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003918- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3919 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3920 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3921 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003922 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003923
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003924- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3925 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003926
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003927- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3928 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003929
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003930- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003931 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003932 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3933 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003934
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003935
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003936What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003937===============================
3938
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003939*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3940
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003941Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003942--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003943
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003944- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3945 with a custom metaclass.
3946
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003947Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003948-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003949
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003950- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3951 are proxies.
3952
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003953Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003954-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003955
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003956- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3957 very short strings.
3958
3959- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3960 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3961 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3962 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3963 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3964
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003965Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003966-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003967
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003968- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3969 close or delete time).
3970
3971- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3972 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3973
3974- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3975
3976- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003977 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003978
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003979Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003980-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003981
3982Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003983-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003984
3985C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003986-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003987
3988New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003989-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003990
3991Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003992-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003993
3994Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003995-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003996
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003997- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3998
3999- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4000 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4001
4002- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4003 deleted at process exit time.
4004
4005- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4006 in backslash.
4007
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004008Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004009----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004010
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004011- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4012 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4013 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4014
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004015
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004016What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004017===========================
4018
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004019*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4020
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004021Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004022--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004023
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004024- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4025 been extensively updated. See
4026
4027 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4028
4029 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4030
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004031- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4032 deleted!
4033
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004034- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4035 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4036 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4037 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4038 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4039
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004040- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4041
4042 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4043 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4044
4045 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4046 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4047 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4048 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4049 supported anyway.
4050
4051 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4052 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4053
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004054- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4055 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4056 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4057 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4058 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004059
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004060- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4061 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4062 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4063
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004064Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004065-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004066
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004067- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4068 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4069 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4070 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4071 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4072 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004073 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4074 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4075 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4076 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004077
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004078- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4079 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4080 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4081
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004082Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004083-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004084
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004085- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4086
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004087Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004088-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004089
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004090- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4091 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4092 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4093 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4094 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4095 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4096
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004097- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4098
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004099- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4100
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004101- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4102
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004103- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4104 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4105 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4106
4107- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4108
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004109Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004110-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004111
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004112- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4113 off a search on Google.
4114
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004115Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004116-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004117
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004118- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4119 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4120 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4121 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4122 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4123 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4124 other platforms should do likewise.
4125
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004126- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4127 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4128 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4129
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004130C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004131-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004132
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004133- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4134 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4135 producing key-value pairs.
4136
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004137- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004138 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004139 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4140 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4141 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4142 previously went unchallenged.
4143
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004144New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004145-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004146
4147Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004148-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004149
4150Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004151-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004152
4153Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004154----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004155
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004156- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4157 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004158
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004159- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4160 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4161 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4162 home.
4163
4164
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004165What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004166===========================
4167
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004168*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4169
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004170Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004171--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004172
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004173- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4174 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004175
4176 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004177 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004178
4179 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4180 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004181 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004182 This needs to be documented.
4183
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004184- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4185 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4186
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004187- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4188 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4189 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4190
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004191- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4192 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4193
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004194- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4195 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4196 class forbids it).
4197
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004198- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4199 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4200 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4201
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004202- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4203
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004204Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004205-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004206
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004207- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4208 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004209 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004210
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004211- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4212 (like 1 + '').
4213
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004214Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004215-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004216
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004217- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4218 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4219 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4220 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004221 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004222 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4223
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004224- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4225 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4226 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4227 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4228
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004229- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4230 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004231 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4232 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4233 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004234
4235- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4236 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004237
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004238- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4239 bytes on its input.
4240
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004241Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004242-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004243
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004244- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004245 convenience function.
4246
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004247- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4248 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4249 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004250 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4251 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4252 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4253 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4254 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4255 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004256
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004257- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4258 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4259 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4260 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4261
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004262- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4263 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4264 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4265
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004266- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4267 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4268 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4269 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4270
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004271- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4272 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004273 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004274 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4275 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4276 new -l and -e options.
4277
4278- statcache is now deprecated.
4279
4280- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4281 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004282 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004283 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4284 time properly taken into account.
4285
4286- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4287 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4288 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4289 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4290
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004291Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004293
4294Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004295-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004296
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004297- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4298 is built with libdb3 if available.
4299
4300- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4301
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004302C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004303-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004304
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004305- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4306 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4307 PySequence_Size().
4308
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004309- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4310
4311- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4312 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4313 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4314
4315- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4316 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4317
4318- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4319 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4320
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004321New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004322-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004323
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004324- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4325 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4326
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004327- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4328 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4329
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004330- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4331
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004332Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004333-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004334
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004335- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4336 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4337
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004338Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004339-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004340
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004341Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004342----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004343
4344- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4345 removed completely in the next release.
4346
4347- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4348 OSX.
4349
4350- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4351 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4352
4353- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4354
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004355
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004356What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004357===========================
4358
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004359*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4360
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004361Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004362--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004363
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004364- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004365 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004366 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004367 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4368 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004369 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4370 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004371 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4372 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004373
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004374- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4375 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4376
4377- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4378 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4379
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004380Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004381-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004382
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004383- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4384 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4385 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4386 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4387 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4388 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4389 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4390 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4391
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004392- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4393 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4394 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4395 example).
4396
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004397- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004398 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004399 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004400 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004401
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004402- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4403 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4404 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004405 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004406
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004407- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4408 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4409 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4410 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4411 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4412 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4413
4414 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4415
4416 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4417
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004418Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004419-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004420
4421- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4422
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004423- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4424
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004425- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4426 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004427
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004428- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4429 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4430 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4431 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4432 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4433 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004434 attributes.
4435
4436- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4437 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4438 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004439
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004440- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4441 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4442 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004443
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004444- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4445 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4446 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004447 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4448 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4449
4450- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4451 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004452
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004453Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004454-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004455
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004456- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4457 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4458
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004459- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4460 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4461 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4462 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4463
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004464- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4465 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4466 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4467 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4468
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004469 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4470 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4471 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4472 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4473 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4474 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4475 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4476 without losing information).
4477
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004478- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004479 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4480 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4481 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4482 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4483 module).
4484
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004485 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004486 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4487 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4488 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4489 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004490
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004491- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004492 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4493 encoding.
4494
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004495- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4496 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4497
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004498- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004499 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4500
4501- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4502 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4503 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4504 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4505
4506- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4507
4508- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4509 ON, and OFF.
4510
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004511- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4512 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4513
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004514Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004515-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004516
4517- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4518 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4519 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004520
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004521- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4522 been added: -X and -E.
4523
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004524Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004525-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004526
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004527- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4528 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4529
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004530C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004531-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004532
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004533- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4534 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4535 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4536 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4537 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4538
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004539- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4540 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4541 as long) arguments.
4542
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004543- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4544 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4545 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4546 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4547 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4548 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4549
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004550- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4551 input.
4552
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004553New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004554-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004555
4556Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004557-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004558
4559Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004560-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004561
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004562- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4563 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4564 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4565
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004566- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4567 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4568 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004569 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004570
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004571 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4572 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4573 import signal
4574 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004575
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004576 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004577 while 1:
4578 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004579 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004580 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4581 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4582 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4583 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004584
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004585
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004586What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4587===========================
4588
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004589*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4590
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004591Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004592--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004593
4594- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4595 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4596 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4597
4598- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4599 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4600 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4601 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4602 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4603 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4604 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004605
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004606- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004607 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004608 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4609 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4610 associate a docstring with a property.
4611
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004612- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4613 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4614 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4615 other built-in object types.
4616
4617- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4618 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4619 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4620 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4621 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4622
4623- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4624 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4625
4626- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4627 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004628 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004629 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4630 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4631 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4632 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4633 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4634
4635- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4636 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4637 class.
4638
4639- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4640 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4641 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4642 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4643
4644- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4645 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4646 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4647 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4648
4649- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4650 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4651
4652- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4653 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4654 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4655 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4656 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004657 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004658 with the same value as s.
4659
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004660- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4661
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004662Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004663----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004664
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004665- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4666
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004667- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4668 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4669 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4670 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4671 objects.
4672
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004673- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4674 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004675 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4676 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4677
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004678- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4679 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4680 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4681
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004682Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004683-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004684
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004685- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4686 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4687 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4688 by the instances.
4689
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004690- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4691 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4692 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4693
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004694- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4695 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4696 before the entire comparison is complete.
4697
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004698- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4699 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4700 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4701
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004702- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4703 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4704 getwriter().
4705
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004706- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4707 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4708
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004709- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004710 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4711 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4712
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004713- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4714 iterable object.
4715
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004716- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4717 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004718
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004719- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4720 authentication.
4721
4722- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4723 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004724
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004725- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004726 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4727 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4728 a sample driver.)
4729
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004730Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004731-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004732
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004733- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4734 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4735 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4736 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4737 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4738 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4739 kernel has large file support.
4740
4741- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4742 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4743 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4744 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4745 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4746
4747- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4748 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4749 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4750
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004751C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004752-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004753
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004754- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4755 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4756
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004757New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004758-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004759
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004760- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4761 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4762
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004763Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004764-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004765
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004766- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4767 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4768 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4769 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4770 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4771
4772- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4773 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4774 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4775 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4776
4777- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4778 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4779
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004780Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004781-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004782
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004783- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004784 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4785 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004786
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004787
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004788What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4789===========================
4790
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004791*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4792
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004793Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004794----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004795
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004796- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4797 big to represent as a C double.
4798
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004799- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4800 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4801 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4802 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4803 restriction).
4804
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004805- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4806 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4807 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4808 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4809 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4810
4811 >>> dir([])
4812 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4813 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4814 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4815 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4816 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4817 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4818 'reverse', 'sort']
4819
4820 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4821
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004822- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004823 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4824 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4825 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4826 OverflowError exception.
4827
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004828- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004829 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004830 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4831 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4832 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4833 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4834 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004835 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004836 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4837 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4838
4839 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4840 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4841 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4842 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004843
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004844- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004845 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4846 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4847 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4848 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4849 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4850 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4851 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4852 once it is created.
4853
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004854- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4855 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4856 (key, value) pairs.
4857
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004858- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004859 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4860 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4861
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004862- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4863 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4864 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4865 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4866 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004867
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004868- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004869 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4870 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4871
4872 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4873
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004874- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004875 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4876
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004877Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004878-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004879
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004880- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004881 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4882 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004883
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004884- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4885 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4886 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4887 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4888 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4889 in this area anymore).
4890
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004891- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4892 threading.Timer.
4893
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004894- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4895 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4896
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004897- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004898 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4899
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004900- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004901 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4902 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4903 converted to Python longs.
4904
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004905- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004906 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4907
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004908- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4909 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4910 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4911
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004912Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004913-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004914
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004915- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4916 division operators as per PEP 238.
4917
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004918Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004919-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004920
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004921- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4922 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4923 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4924 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4925
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004926C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004927-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004928
4929- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004930
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004931- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4932 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004933 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004934
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004935 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4936 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004937 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004938 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004939
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004940- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004941 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4942 module:
4943
4944 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004945
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004946 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4947 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004948
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004949 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4950 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004951
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004952 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4953
4954 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4955
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004956- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004957 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4958 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4959 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004960
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004961New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004962-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004963
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004964- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4965 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4966 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4967 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4968 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004969
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004970Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004971-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004972
4973Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004974-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004975
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004976- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4977 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4978 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4979 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004980 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4981 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4982 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4983 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4984 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004985
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004986- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004987 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4988
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004989
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004990What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4991===========================
4992
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004993*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4994
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004995Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004996-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004997
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004998- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4999 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5000
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005001- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5002 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5003 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005004
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005005- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5006 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5007 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5008 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005009
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005010- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5011
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005012- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005013
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005014Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005015-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005016
5017- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005018 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005019 the module docstring for details.
5020
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005021Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005022-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005023
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005024- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005025 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5026 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5027 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005028
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005029- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5030 Nick Mathewson.
5031
5032Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005033----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005034
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005035- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5036 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5037 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5038 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5039 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5040 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5041 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5042 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5043
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005044- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5045 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5046 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5047 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5048
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005049- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5050 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5051 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5052 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5053 come a long way).
5054
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005055- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5056 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5057 write filters for these warnings).
5058
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005059- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5060 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5061 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5062 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5063 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5064
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005065- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5066 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5067 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5068 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5069 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5070 older distribution.
5071
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005072Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005073-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005074
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005075- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5076 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005077 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005078
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005079- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5080 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5081 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5082
5083- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5084
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005085- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5086
5087- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5088
5089- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5090
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005091- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005092
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005093- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5094
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005095New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005096-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005097
5098C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005099-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005100
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005101- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5102 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5103 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5104 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5105 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5106 against buffer overruns.
5107
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005108- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005109 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5110 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005111 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5112 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5113 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5114
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005115- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5116 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5117 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5118 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5119 deprecated.
5120
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005121Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005122-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005123
5124- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5125 relevant is found.
5126
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005127
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005128What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005129===========================
5130
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005131*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5132
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005133Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005134----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005135
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005136- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5137 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5138 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5139 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5140 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5141 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5142 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5143 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005144 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005145 repaired.
5146
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005147- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005148 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005149 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5150 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5151 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5152 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5153 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5154 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5155 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5156 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5157
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005158- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5159 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5160 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5161 leading BMO character).
5162
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005163- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5164 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5165 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5166
5167 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5168 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5169 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005170
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005171 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5172 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5173 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5174 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5175 for various simple to use conversions.
5176
5177 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5178 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5179
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005180 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5181 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5182 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5183 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5184 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5185 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5186 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5187 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5188 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5189 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5190 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5191 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5192 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5193 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5194 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005195
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005196- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5197 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5198 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005199 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005200 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005201
5202 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005203 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5204 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5205 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5206 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5207 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005208 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5209 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005210
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005211 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5212 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5213 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005214 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005215
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005216- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5217 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5218 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5219 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5220 floating arithmetic,
5221
5222 x = 9007199254740992.0
5223 print long(x)
5224
5225 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5226 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5227 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5228 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5229 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5230 functions are of good quality).
5231
5232 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5233 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5234 algorithms to break.
5235
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005236- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5237 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5238 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5239 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5240 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5241 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5242 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5243 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5244 order.
5245
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005246- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5247 operation along the most common code paths.
5248
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005249- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5250 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5251
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005252- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5253 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5254 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5255 {}.update(UserDict())
5256
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005257- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5258 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5259 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5260 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5261 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5262 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5263 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5264 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5265
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005266- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005267 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005268
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005269 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005270 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5271 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005272 join() method of strings
5273 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005274 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5275 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005276 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005277 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005278
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005279- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5280 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5281
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005282- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5283 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5284
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005285- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5286 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5287 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5288 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5289
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005290- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5291 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005292 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005293 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5294 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005295
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005296- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5297
5298
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005299Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005300-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005301
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005302- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005303 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005304 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5305 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5306
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005307- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5308 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5309
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005310- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5311 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5312 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5313 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5314
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005315- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5316 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5317 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5318
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005319- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5320
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005321- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5322
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005323- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5324 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5325 that are still imported into string.py).
5326
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005327- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5328
5329- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5330 Now it does.
5331
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005332- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5333
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005334- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5335 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5336 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5337 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5338 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005339 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5340 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005341
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005342- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5343 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5344 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5345 'help(object)'.
5346
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005347Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005348-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005349
5350- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005351 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005352 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5353 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5354
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005355- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005356 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5357 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005358
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005359C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005360-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005361
5362- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5363 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005364
5365----
5366
5367**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**