blob: f619829399ed42a952f2b125480d4d2252b676af [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 Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000020- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
21 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
22
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000023- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
24 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
25 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
26
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000027
28Library
29-------
30
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000031- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
32 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
33
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +000034- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
35
Raymond Hettingerc7979f12004-12-05 11:38:18 +000036- the deprecated tzparse module was removed.
37
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +000038- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
39
Raymond Hettinger4ebe3642004-12-05 04:55:14 +000040- the depecated statcache module was removed.
41
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +000042- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
43
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +000044- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
45
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +000046- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
47
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +000048- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
49 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
50 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
51
Raymond Hettinger784ab762004-12-04 10:50:51 +000052- the deprecated whrandom module was removed. Use the random module instead.
53
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000054- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000055 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000056
57
58Build
59-----
60
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +000061- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
62 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
63 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
64 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
65 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
66 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
67 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
68 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
69
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000070
71C API
72-----
73
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +000074- Removed PyRange_New().
75
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000076
77Tests
78-----
79
80
81Mac
82---
83
84
85
86Tools/Demos
87-----------
88
89
90
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +000091What's New in Python 2.4 final?
92===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +000093
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +000094*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +000095
96Core and builtins
97-----------------
98
99- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
100 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
101 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
102
103
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000104What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
105==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000106
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000107*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000108
109Core and builtins
110-----------------
111
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000112- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
113 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
114 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
115
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000116
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000117Library
118-------
119
120- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
121 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
122 raised is re-raised.
123
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000124- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
125 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
126
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000127- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
128 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
129 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
130 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
131 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
132 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
133 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
134 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
135 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
136 by the slice are recomputed now.
137
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000138- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000139
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000140Build
141-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000142
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000143- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
144 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
145 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000146
147C API
148-----
149
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000150- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
151
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000152
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000153What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
154================================
155
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000156*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000157
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000158License
159-------
160
161The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
162is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
163changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
164Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
165intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
166durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
167the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
168License::
169
170 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
171
172says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
173to Python 2.1.1.
174
175The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
176License Version 2.
177
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000178Core and builtins
179-----------------
180
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000181- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
182 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
183 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
184 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
185 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
186 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
187 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
188 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
189 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
190 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
191
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000192- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000193
194Extension Modules
195-----------------
196
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000197- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
198 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
199 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
200 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000201
202Library
203-------
204
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000205- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
206 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
207 returned.
208
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000209- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
210
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000211- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
212 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
213
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000214- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
215
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000216- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
217 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000218
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000219- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
220
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000221- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
222
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000223- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000224 the source code is updated and reloaded.
225
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000226Build
227-----
228
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000229- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000230
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000231What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
232================================
233
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000234*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000235
236Core and builtins
237-----------------
238
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000239- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000240 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
241
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000242- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
243 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
244 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
245 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
246
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000247- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
248 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
249
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000250- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
251 constant.
252
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000253- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
254 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
255 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
256 large), and to anomalies such as
257 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
258 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
259 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
260 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000261
262Extension modules
263-----------------
264
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000265- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
266 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000267 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
268 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
269 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000270
271Library
272-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000273
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000274- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000275 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000276 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
277 --swig-cpp.
278
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000279- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
280 it is set.
281
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000282- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000283
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000284- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
285 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
286 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
287 Closes bug #1039270.
288
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000289- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000290
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000291 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000292 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
293 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
294 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
295 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
296 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
297 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
298 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
299 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
300 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
301 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
302 + Updates to documentation.
303
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000304- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
305 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
306 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
307 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
308
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000309- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000310
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000311- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
312 applications should use the getmember function.
313
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000314- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
315
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000316- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
317 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
318 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
319 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
320 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
321 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
322 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
323 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
324 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
325
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000326- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
327 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000328 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000329
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000330- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
331 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
332 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
333 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
334 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
335 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
336 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
337 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000338
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000339- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
340 the new public features (of which there are many).
341
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000342- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000343 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
344 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
345 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
346 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000347 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000348
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000349- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
350
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000351- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
352 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
353 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
354 options.
355
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000356- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
357 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
358 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
359 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
360 conditions under which non-string values work.
361
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000362Build
363-----
364
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000365- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
366 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
367 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
368
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000369- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
370 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
371 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
372 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
373 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000374
375C API
376-----
377
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000378- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
379 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
380
381- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
382
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000383- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
384 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
385 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
386 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
387 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
388 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
389 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
390 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
391 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
392
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000393- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
394
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000395- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
396 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
397 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000398
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000399Tests
400-----
401
402- test__locale ported to unittest
403
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000404Mac
405---
406
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000407- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
408 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
409 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000410
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000411Tools/Demos
412-----------
413
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000414- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
415 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
416 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
417 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
418 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000419
420
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000421What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
422=================================
423
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000424*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000425
426Core and builtins
427-----------------
428
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000429- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000430 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
431
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000432- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
433 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
434 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
435 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
436 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
437 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
438 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
439 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000440 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
441 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
442 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
443 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
444 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000445
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000446- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
447 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
448 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
449 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
450 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
451
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000452- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
453
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000454- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
455 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
456
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000457- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
458 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
459 modified the list.
460
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000461- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
462 functions is now writable.
463
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000464- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
465 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
466 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
467 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
468
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000469- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
470 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
471 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
472 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
473 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000474
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000475- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
476 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
477
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000478Extension modules
479-----------------
480
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000481- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
482
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000483- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
484 data.
485
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000486- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
487 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
488 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
489 supposed to have been truncated away.
490
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000491- Added socket.socketpair().
492
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000493- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
494 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
495
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000496- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000497 versions of Python, have now been removed.
498
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000499Library
500-------
501
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000502- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000503 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000504
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000505- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
506 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
507
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000508- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
509 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
510
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000511- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
512
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000513- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
514 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000515
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000516- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
517 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
518
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000519- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
520
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000521- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
522
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000523- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
524
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000525- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
526 Percivall.
527
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000528- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
529 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
530
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000531- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
532 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
533 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000534 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000535
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000536- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
537 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
538 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
539 and exponent.
540
541- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
542
543- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
544 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
545 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
546
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000547- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
548 to the readline module.
549
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000550- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000551 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
552 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000553
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000554- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
555 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
556 contains symlinks.
557
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000558- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
559 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
560
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000561- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
562 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
563 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
564
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000565- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
566 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
567 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
568 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
569 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
570 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
571 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
572 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
573 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
574 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
575 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
576 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
577 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
578
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000579- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
580
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000581Tools/Demos
582-----------
583
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000584- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
585 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
586
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000587- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
588
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000589Build
590-----
591
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000592- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
593 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
594 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
595 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
596 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
597 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
598 plans to do so.
599
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000600- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
601 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
602
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000603- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
604 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
605
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000606- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
607 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
608
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000609- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
610 GNU/k*BSD systems.
611
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000612- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
613 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
614
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000615C API
616-----
617
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000618..
619
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000620Documentation
621-------------
622
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000623- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
624 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
625
626- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
627 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
628 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000629
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000630New platforms
631-------------
632
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000633- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
634
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000635Tests
636-----
637
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000638..
639
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000640Windows
641-------
642
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000643- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
644 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
645 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
646 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
647 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
648 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
649 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
650 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
651 the problem.
652
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000653Mac
654---
655
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000656..
657
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000658
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000659What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
660=================================
661
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000662*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000663
664Core and builtins
665-----------------
666
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000667- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
668 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
669 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
670 sensitive code.
671
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000672- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000673 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000674
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000675 @staticmethod
676 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000677
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000678 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000679
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000680- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
681 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
682 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
683 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
684 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
685 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
686 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
687 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
688 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
689 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
690 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
691
692 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
693 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
694 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
695 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
696 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
697 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
698 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
699
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000700- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
701 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
702
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000703- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000704 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000705
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000706- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000707 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000708 which was missing for no apparent reason.
709
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000710- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000711 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
712 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
713
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000714- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
715 types that support garbage collection.
716
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000717- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
718
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000719- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
720 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
721 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
722 Jython.
723
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000724- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
725
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000726- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
727 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
728
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000729- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
730 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
731 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000732
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000733- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
734 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
735 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
736
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000737Extension modules
738-----------------
739
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000740- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
741
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000742Library
743-------
744
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000745- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
746 TIS-620
747
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000748- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
749 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
750 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
751 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
752 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
753 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
754 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
755 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
756 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
757 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
758
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000759- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
760
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000761- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
762 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
763 same as when the argument is omitted).
764 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
765
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000766- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
767
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000768- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
769 schemes are offered.
770
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000771- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
772
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000773- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
774 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
775 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
776
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000777- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
778
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000779- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
780 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
781
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000782- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
783 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
784 when dummy_threading is being used.
785
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000786- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
787 from a tarfile.
788
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000789- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000790 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000791
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000792- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
793 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
794 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
795 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
796
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000797- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
798 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
799
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000800- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
801 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
802 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
803 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
804 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
805 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
806 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
807 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
808 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
809 by some other method in progress).
810
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000811- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
812 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
813 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000814
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000815- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
816
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000817- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
818 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
819 AM Kuchling.
820
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000821- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
822 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
823 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
824
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000825- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
826 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
827 instead of unsigned.
828
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000829- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000830 no longer part of the public API.
831
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000832- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
833 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
834 string methods of the same name).
835
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000836- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000837 SF patch 945642.
838
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000839- doctest unittest integration improvements:
840
841 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
842
843 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
844 DocTestSuites.
845
846- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
847 that provide thread-local data.
848
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000849- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
850 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
851
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000852- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
853
854- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
855 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
856 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
857
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000858- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
859
860 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
861 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
862 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000863
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000864 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
865 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
866 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
867 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
868
869 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
870 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
871
872 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
873 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
874 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
875 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
876
877 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
878 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
879 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
880 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
881 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
882
883 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
884 wrapping help output.
885
886 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
887 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
888 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000889
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000890C API
891-----
892
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000893- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
894 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
895 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
896 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
897 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
898 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
899 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
900 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
901 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
902 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
903 its visible semantics have not changed.
904
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000905- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
906 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
907
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000908Documentation
909-------------
910
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000911- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000912
913 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000914 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000915
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000916 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000917
918 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
919
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000920- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000921
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000922Tests
923-----
924
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000925- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000926 platforms that use the Makefile.
927
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000928- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
929 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
930 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
931
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000932
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000933What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
934=================================
935
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000936*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000937
938Core and builtins
939-----------------
940
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000941- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
942 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
943 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
944 objects now (one object instead of three).
945
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000946- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
947 Windows DLLs.
948
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000949- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
950 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000951
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000952- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
953 a new .pyc magic.
954
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000955- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
956 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
957 be there.
958
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000959- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
960 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
961 the LC_NUMERIC category.
962
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000963- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
964 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
965 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
966
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000967- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
968
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000969- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
970 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
971 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000972
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000973- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
974 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
975
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000976- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
977
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000978- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000979 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000980
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000981- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
982
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000983- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
984
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000985- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
986 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
987
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000988- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
989 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
990 Fixes bug #858016 .
991
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000992- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
993 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
994 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
995
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000996- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
997 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
998 improves their performance (about 35%).
999
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001000- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1001 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1002 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1003
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001004- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1005 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1006 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1007 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1008
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001009- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1010 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1011 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1012 length is not known).
1013
1014- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1015 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001016 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1017 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001018 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1019
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001020- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1021 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1022
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001023- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1024 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1025 keyword arguments.
1026
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001027- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1028 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1029 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1030
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001031- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1032 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1033 cases.
1034
1035- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1036 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1037 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1038 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1039 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1040 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1041 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1042 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1043 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1044 a release build.
1045
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001046- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1047 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1048
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001049- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001050 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001051
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001052- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1053 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1054 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1055 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1056 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1057 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1058 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1059 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1060 destroyed.
1061
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001062- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1063 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1064 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1065 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1066 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1067 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1068 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1069 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1070
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001071- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1072 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1073 character other than a space.
1074
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001075- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1076 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1077 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1078 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1079 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1080 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1081 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1082 attributes with the same name.
1083
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001084- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1085 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1086 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1087 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1088 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1089 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1090 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1091 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1092 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1093 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1094 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1095 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1096 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1097 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001098
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001099- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1100 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1101 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1102 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1103 This has been repaired.
1104
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001105- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1106
1107- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1108
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001109- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1110 over a sequence.
1111
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001112- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001113 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001114
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001115- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1116
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001117- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1118 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1119 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1120 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1121 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1122 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1123 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1124 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1125
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001126- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1127 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1128 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1129
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001130- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1131 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1132 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1133 freelist.
1134
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001135- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1136 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1137
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001138- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1139 number.
1140
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001141- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1142 a TypeError exception.
1143
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001144- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1145 820195.
1146
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001147- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1148 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1149 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1150
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001151- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001152 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1153 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001154
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001155- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1156 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1157 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1158
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001159- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1160 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001161 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001162
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001163- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001164 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1165 the first call.
1166
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001167
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001168Extension modules
1169-----------------
1170
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001171- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1172 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1173
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001174- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1175 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1176 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1177 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1178 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1179 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1180 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001181
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001182- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1183
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001184- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1185
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001186- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1187 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1188
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001189- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1190 fewer false positives.
1191
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001192- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1193 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1194
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001195- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001196 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1197
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001198- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001199 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001200 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001201 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1202 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001203
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001204- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1205 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1206 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1207 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1208
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001209- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1210 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1211 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1212 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1213 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1214 #897625.
1215
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001216- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1217 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1218
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001219- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1220 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1221 and pops on either side of the deque.
1222
1223- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1224 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1225
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001226- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1227 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1228 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1229 other functions that expect a function argument.
1230
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001231- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1232
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001233- os.getsid was added.
1234
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001235- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1236 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1237 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1238
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001239- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1240
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001241- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1242
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001243- readline.clear_history was added.
1244
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001245- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1246
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001247- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1248
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001249- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1250
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001251- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1252
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001253- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1254
1255- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1256
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001257- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1258
1259- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1260
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001261- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1262 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1263 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1264
1265- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1266 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1267 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1268 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1269 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1270 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1271 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1272
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001273- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1274 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1275 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1276 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001277
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001278- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001279 iterators from a single iterable.
1280
1281- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1282 of raising a TypeError exception.
1283
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001284- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1285 as parameter.
1286
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001287Library
1288-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001289
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001290- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1291 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1292 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001293
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001294- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1295 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1296 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001297
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001298- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001299
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001300- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1301 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001302
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001303- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1304 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1305
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001306- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1307
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001308- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001309 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001310
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001311- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001312 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001313
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001314- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1315
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001316- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1317 on cygwin and mingw32.
1318
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001319- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1320
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001321- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1322 module.
1323
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001324- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1325 installation scheme for all platforms.
1326
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001327- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001328 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001329
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001330- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1331 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1332 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1333
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001334- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1335 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1336 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1337
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001338- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1339
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001340- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1341
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001342- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1343 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1344
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001345- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1346 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1347 type pattern with the same value exists.
1348
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001349- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1350 when run from the command prompt).
1351
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001352- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1353 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1354
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001355- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1356 default sort).
1357
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001358- Added global runctx function to profile module
1359
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001360- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1361
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001362- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1363
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001364- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1365
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001366- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001367 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1368 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1369 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1370 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1371 accordingly.
1372
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001373- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1374 decoding standards.
1375
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001376- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1377 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1378 called for all requests.
1379
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001380- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1381 they are passed to the compiler.
1382
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001383- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1384 indent, width and depth.
1385
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001386- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1387 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1388
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001389- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1390 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1391
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001392- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1393
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001394- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1395
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001396- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1397
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001398- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1399 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1400
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001401- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001402 for better performance.
1403
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001404- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001405
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001406- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1407 a string).
1408
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001409- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1410
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001411- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1412
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001413- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1414
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001415- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1416
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001417- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1418 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1419 list of fieldnames.
1420
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001421- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1422 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1423
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001424- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1425
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001426- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1427 empty lists.
1428
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001429- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1430 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1431 and shelves.
1432
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001433- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1434 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1435
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001436- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001437 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1438 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001439
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001440- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1441 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001442 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001443
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001444- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001445 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1446 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1447
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001448- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1449 and removed in Py2.4.
1450
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001451- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1452
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001453- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1454
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001455Tools/Demos
1456-----------
1457
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001458- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1459 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1460
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001461- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1462
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001463- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1464 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1465 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1466 destination in situations where both files are given.
1467
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001468- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1469 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1470 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1471 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1472
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001473- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1474
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001475- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1476 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1477 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1478 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1479 now.
1480
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001481- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1482 in effect
1483
1484- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1485 C-c C-h
1486
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001487- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1488 -d option was given.
1489
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001490Build
1491-----
1492
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001493- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1494 build under OS X.
1495
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001496- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1497 --enable-profiling.
1498
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001499- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1500 is configured --with-tsc.
1501
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001502- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1503 on AMD64.
1504
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001505- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1506 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1507
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001508- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1509 removed.
1510
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001511- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1512 supported (see PEP 11).
1513
1514- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1515
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001516- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1517
1518- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1519 (see PEP 11).
1520
1521- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1522 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1523
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001524C API
1525-----
1526
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001527- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1528 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1529 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1530
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001531- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1532 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1533 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1534 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1535
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001536- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1537 generator objects.
1538
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001539- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1540 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001541 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1542 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001543
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001544- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1545 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1546
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001547- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1548 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1549 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1550 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1551 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1552
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001553- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1554 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1555 about 10% faster.
1556
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001557- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1558 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1559
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001560- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1561 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1562 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1563 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1564
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001565Windows
1566-------
1567
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001568- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1569 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1570 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1571 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1572
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001573- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1574 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1575 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1576
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001577
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001578What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1579===============================
1580
1581*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1582
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001583IDLE
1584----
1585
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001586- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1587 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1588 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1589 context-menu actions.
1590
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001591- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1592 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1593 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1594 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1595 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1596 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1597 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1598 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1599 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1600
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001601
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001602What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1603=============================================
1604
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001605*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001606
1607Core and builtins
1608-----------------
1609
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001610- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001611 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001612 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1613
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001614Extension modules
1615-----------------
1616
1617- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1618 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1619 than once. This has been fixed.
1620
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001621- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1622 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1623 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1624 call.
1625
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001626- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1627
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001628Library
1629-------
1630
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001631- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1632 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1633
1634- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1635 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1636 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1637 restored.
1638
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001639IDLE
1640----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001641
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001642- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001643
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001644Build
1645-----
1646
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001647- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1648 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1649
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001650C API
1651-----
1652
1653Windows
1654-------
1655
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001656- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1657 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1658
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001659- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1660
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001661Mac
1662---
1663
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001664- Various fixes to pimp.
1665
1666- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1667
1668- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1669 more problems than it solves.
1670
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001671
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001672What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1673=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001674
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001675*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1676
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001677Core and builtins
1678-----------------
1679
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001680- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1681 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1682
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001683- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1684 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001685 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001686
1687- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1688 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1689 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001690 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001691
1692- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1693 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001694
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001695- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1696 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1697 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1698
1699- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001700 770247.
1701
1702- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001703
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001704Extension modules
1705-----------------
1706
1707- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1708 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1709
1710- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1711
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001712- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1713
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001714- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1715 contained within the _strptime module.
1716
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001717- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1718 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1719
1720- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001721 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1722
1723- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1724 the find_class attribute, if present.
1725
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001726- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001727
1728 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1729 (SF bug 763298).
1730
1731 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001732 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1733 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1734 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001735
1736 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1737
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001738Library
1739-------
1740
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001741- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1742
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001743- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1744 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1745 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1746 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1747 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1748 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1749 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1750 or Tester().
1751
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001752- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1753 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1754 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1755 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1756 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1757 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1758 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1759 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1760 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001761
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001762 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001763
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001764- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1765 weren't before was an oversight.
1766
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001767- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1768 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1769
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001770- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1771 when there are no lines.
1772
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001773- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1774 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1775
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001776- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1777 to child processes.
1778
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001779- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1780
1781- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1782
1783- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1784 xmlrpclib.
1785
1786- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1787 responses.
1788
1789- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1790 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1791
1792- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1793 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1794 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1795
1796- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1797 used as patterns.
1798
1799- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1800 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1801 than Tk 8.3.
1802
1803- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1804
1805- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001806
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001807Tools/Demos
1808-----------
1809
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001810- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1811
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001812- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1813
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001814- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001815
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001816Build
1817-----
1818
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001819- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1820
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001821- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1822
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001823- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1824 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001825
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001826- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1827 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1828 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001829
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001830C API
1831-----
1832
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001833- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1834 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1835
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001836Windows
1837-------
1838
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001839- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1840 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1841 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1842 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1843 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1844 Python exception ::
1845
1846 thread.error: can't start new thread
1847
1848 is raised now.
1849
1850- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1851 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1852 instead of from DLL teardown.
1853
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001854Mac
1855---
1856
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001857- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001858 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001859 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1860 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1861 the executable in the bundle.
1862
1863- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001864
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001865- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1866
1867- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1868 on Panther.
1869
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001870What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1871================================
1872
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001873*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001874
1875Core and builtins
1876-----------------
1877
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001878- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1879 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1880 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1881 with the -i option.
1882
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001883- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1884 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1885
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001886- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1887 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1888
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001889- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1890 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1891 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1892 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1893 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1894 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1895 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1896 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1897 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1898 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1899 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1900 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1901 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001902
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001903- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1904 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1905 embedded in a lambda expression.
1906
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001907- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1908 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1909 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1910 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1911 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1912
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001913- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1914 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1915 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1916
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001917- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1918 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1919
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001920- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1921 It's writable again.
1922
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001923- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1924 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1925 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001926 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001927
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001928- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1929 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1930 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1931
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001932Extension modules
1933-----------------
1934
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001935- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1936 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1937
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001938- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1939 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1940 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1941 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1942
1943- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1944 collection.
1945
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001946- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1947 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1948 unique within a single program run.
1949
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001950- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1951 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1952
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001953- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1954 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1955
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001956- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1957 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001958
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001959- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1960
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001961- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1962 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1963
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001964- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1965 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1966 for many BSD-derived systems.
1967
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001968
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001969Library
1970-------
1971
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001972- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1973 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1974 primary ones:
1975
1976 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1977 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1978 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1979
1980 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1981 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1982 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1983 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1984 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1985 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1986
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001987- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1988 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1989 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1990 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1991 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1992 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1993 argument.
1994
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001995- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1996 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1997 in the archive.
1998
1999- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2000 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2001
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002002- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2003 569574).
2004
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002005- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2006 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2007 no more.
2008
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002009- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2010 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2011 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2012 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2013 code coverage.
2014
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002015- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2016 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2017 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002018 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2019 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002020
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002021- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2022 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2023 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002024 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002025
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002026- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2027
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002028- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2029 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2030 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2031 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2032
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002033- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2034 handling.
2035
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002036- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2037 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2038
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002039- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2040 in socket.py.
2041
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002042- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2043
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002044- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2045 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2046 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2047 opener with proxy support.
2048
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002049- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2050
2051- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2052
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002053Tools/Demos
2054-----------
2055
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002056- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2057
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002058- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2059
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002060- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2061 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002062
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002063- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2064 files.
2065
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002066Build
2067-----
2068
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002069- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002070 different root directory.
2071
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002072C API
2073-----
2074
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002075- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2076 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2077 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2078 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2079 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2080 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2081 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2082 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2083 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2084 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2085
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002086- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2087 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2088 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2089 from Python.
2090
2091
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002092New platforms
2093-------------
2094
2095None this time.
2096
2097Tests
2098-----
2099
2100- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2101 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2102
2103Windows
2104-------
2105
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002106- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2107
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002108- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2109 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2110 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2111 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2112 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2113 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2114 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2115 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2116 that's what it's for.
2117
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002118Mac
2119---
2120
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002121- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2122 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2123 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2124 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002125- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2126 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2127- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002128
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002129SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2130------------------------------------
2131
2132430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2133598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2134622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2135661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2136683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2137697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2138713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2139724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2140727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2141729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2142730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2143731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2144732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2145733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2146735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2147740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2148744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2149745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2150747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2151749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2152751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2153753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2154755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2155757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2156760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2157
2158
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002159What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2160================================
2161
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002162*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002163
2164Core and builtins
2165-----------------
2166
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002167- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2168 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2169
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002170- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2171 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2172 and cannot be strings).
2173
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002174- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2175 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2176 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2177 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2178
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002179- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2180 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2181 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2182 Python itself.
2183
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002184- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2185 the referenced object, if it has one.
2186
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002187- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2188 the thread started at
2189 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2190
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002191- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2192 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2193 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2194 placed on a list index.
2195
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002196- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2197 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2198 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2199 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2200
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002201- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2202 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2203 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2204 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2205 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2206 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2207 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2208
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002209- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2210 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2211 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2212 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2213 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2214
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002215- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2216 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002217
2218- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2219 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2220 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2221 #693195.)
2222
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002223- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2224 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002225
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002226- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002227 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002228 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2229 interpreter executions, would fail.
2230
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002231- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002232 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002233 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002234
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002235Extension modules
2236-----------------
2237
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002238- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2239 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2240 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2241 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2242
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002243- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2244 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2245
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002246- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2247 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2248 and Greg Chapman.)
2249
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002250- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2251 recursively.
2252
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002253- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002254 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2255 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2256 leaks.
2257
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002258- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2259
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002260- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2261 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2262 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2263 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2264 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2265 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2266 #705836.
2267
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002268- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002269 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2270
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002271- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2272 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2273 See SF bug #692416.
2274
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002275- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2276 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2277
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002278- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2279 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2280 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002281
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002282- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002283 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2284 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2285
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002286- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2287 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2288 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2289 timeouts to work properly.
2290
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002291Library
2292-------
2293
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002294- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2295 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2296 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2297 future release.
2298
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002299- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2300 for querying platform dependent features.
2301
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002302- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002303
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002304- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2305 pickle protocol versions.
2306
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002307- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2308 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2309 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2310
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002311- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2312
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002313- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2314 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2315 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2316 modules.
2317
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002318- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2319 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2320 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2321
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002322- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2323 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2324
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002325- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2326 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2327 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2328
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002329- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002330 MS Office extensions.
2331
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002332- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2333 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2334
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002335- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2336 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2337
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002338- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2339 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2340 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2341 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2342 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2343 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2344
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002345- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2346 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2347 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002348
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002349- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2350 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2351 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2352
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002353- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2354
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002355- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2356 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2357 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2358
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002359Tools/Demos
2360-----------
2361
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002362- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2363 See the module docstring for details.
2364
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002365Build
2366-----
2367
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002368- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2369 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002370
2371C API
2372-----
2373
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002374- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2375
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002376- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2377 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2378 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2379
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002380- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2381 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002382
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002383 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2384 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2385 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002386
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002387- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002388 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2389
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002390- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2391 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2392 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002393
2394New platforms
2395-------------
2396
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002397None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002398
2399Tests
2400-----
2401
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002402- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2403 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002404
2405Windows
2406-------
2407
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002408- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2409 function.
2410
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002411- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2412 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002413
2414Mac
2415---
2416
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002417- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2418 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002419
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002420- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2421 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002422
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002423- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2424 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2425 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002426
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002427- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002428 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2429 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002430
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002431- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2432 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002433
2434
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002435What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2436=================================
2437
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002438*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002439
2440Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002441-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002442
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002443- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2444 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2445 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2446
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002447- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2448 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2449 (SF patch #664376.)
2450
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002451- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2452 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2453 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2454 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2455 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2456 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002457 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002458
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002459- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2460 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2461 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2462 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002463 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002464
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002465- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2466 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2467 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2468 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2469 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2470 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2471 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2472 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2473 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2474 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2475 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2476
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002477- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2478 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2479 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2480 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2481 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2482 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2483
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002484- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2485 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2486
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002487- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2488 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2489 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2490 case.)
2491
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002492- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2493 passed as unicode strings.
2494
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002495- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2496 See SF bug #683467.
2497
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002498- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2499 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2500
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002501- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2502
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002503- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2504
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002505- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2506 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2507 arguments.
2508
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002509- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2510 See SF bug #667147.
2511
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002512- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002513 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002514 See SF bug #676155.
2515
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002516- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002517 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002518 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2519 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2520 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2521 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2522 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2523 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002524
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002525Extension modules
2526-----------------
2527
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002528- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2529 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2530 tp_as_number pointer.
2531
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002532- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2533 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2534 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2535 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2536 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2537
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002538- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2539
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002540- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2541
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002542- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002543 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002544 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2545 patch #678531.)
2546
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002547- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2548 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2549
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002550- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2551 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2552
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002553- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2554
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002555- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2556 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2557 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2558
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002559- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2560
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002561- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2562 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2563
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002564- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002565
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002566- datetime changes:
2567
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002568 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2569
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002570 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2571 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2572 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2573 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2574 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2575 now.
2576
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002577 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002578 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2579 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002580
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002581 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002582 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002583 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2584 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2585 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2586 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002587
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002588 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2589 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2590 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002591 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2592
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002593 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2594 by a later example coded by Guido.
2595
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002596 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002597 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2598 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2599 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002600 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2601 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2602
2603 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2604 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2605 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2606 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2607 tzinfo subclass instance.
2608
2609 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2610 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2611 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2612 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2613 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2614 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2615 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2616 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002617
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002618 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2619 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2620 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2621 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2622 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002623 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2624
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002625 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002626
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002627 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2628 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2629 as a naive datetime object.
2630
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002631 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2632 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2633 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2634
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002635 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2636 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2637 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2638 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2639 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2640 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2641 comparison.
2642
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002643 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2644 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2645 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2646 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002647 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002648
2649 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002650
2651 and ::
2652
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002653 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2654
2655 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2656 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2657 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2658 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2659
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002660 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2661 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2662 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2663 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2664 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2665
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002666 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2667 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002668 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2669 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002670
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002671Library
2672-------
2673
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002674- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2675 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2676
2677- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2678 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2679 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2680 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2681 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2682 See PEP 307 for details.
2683
2684- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2685 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2686
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002687- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2688 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002689 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002690 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2691 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002692 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002693
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002694- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2695 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2696
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002697- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2698 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2699 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2700
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002701- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2702
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002703- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2704 exception.
2705
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002706- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2707 class.
2708
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002709- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2710 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2711 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2712
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002713- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2714 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2715
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002716- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002717 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2718 See SF bug #659228.
2719
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002720- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2721 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2722 See SF patch #651082.
2723
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002724- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002725
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002726- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2727 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2728
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002729- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002730 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002731
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002732- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2733 DOS paths from other platforms.
2734
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002735Tools/Demos
2736-----------
2737
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002738- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2739 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2740 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2741 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2742 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2743 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2744 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2745 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2746 example:
2747
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002748 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2749 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002750
2751 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2752
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002753
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002754Build
2755-----
2756
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002757- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2758 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2759 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002760 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2761
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002762 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2763
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002764- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2765 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2766 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2767 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2768 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2769 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2770 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2771 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2772 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2773
2774- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2775 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2776 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2777 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2778
2779- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2780 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2781
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002782C API
2783-----
2784
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002785- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2786 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002787
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002788- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2789 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2790 tp_as_number pointer.
2791
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002792- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2793 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2794 (SF #681367)
2795
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002796- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2797 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2798 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2799 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002800
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002801Tests
2802-----
2803
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002804- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002805 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2806 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2807 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2808 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2809 pydoc.)
2810
2811- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2812
2813- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002814
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002815Windows
2816-------
2817
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002818- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2819 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2820 time).
2821
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002822- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2823 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2824
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002825- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2826 release without strong cryptography.
2827
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002828- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002829 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002830
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002831- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2832 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2833
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002834Mac
2835---
2836
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002837- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2838 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002839
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002840- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2841 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2842 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002843
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002844- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2845 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002846
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002847- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2848 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2849 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2850 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002851
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002852- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002853 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2854 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2855 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002856
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002857
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002858What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002859=================================
2860
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002861*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002862
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002863Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002864--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002865
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002866- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2867
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002868- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2869 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002870 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002871 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002872 a different meaning than before.
2873
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002874- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002875 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002876 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002877
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002878- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002879 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002880 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002881
2882- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2883 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2884 and deallocation.
2885
2886- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2887 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2888
2889- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2890 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2891 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2892 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2893 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2894
2895- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2896 now detected by the garbage collector.
2897
2898- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2899 [SF bug 519621]
2900
2901- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2902 identifier.
2903
2904- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2905 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2906 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2907 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2908 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2909 [SF bug 563060]
2910
2911- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2912 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2913 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2914 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2915 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2916
2917- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2918 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2919 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2920
2921- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2922
2923- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2924 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2925 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2926 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2927 state of the slots would be lost.)
2928
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002929Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002930-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002931
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002932- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002933 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2934 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2935 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2936 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002937 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2938 Jython 2.1.
2939
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002940- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002941 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002942 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2943 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2944 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2945 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2946 these, see PEP 302.
2947
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002948- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2949 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2950 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2951
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002952- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2953 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2954 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2955
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002956- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2957 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2958 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2959
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002960- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2961 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2962 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2963 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2964 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2965 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2966 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2967 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2968 releases or implementations.
2969
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002970- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002971 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2972 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002973
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002974- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2975 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2976
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002977- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2978 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2979 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2980
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002981- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2982 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2983
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002984- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2985 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002986 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2987 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002988
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002989- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2990 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2991 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2992 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2993 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2994
2995 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2996 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2997 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2998 pattern.
2999
3000 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3001 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3002 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3003 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3004
3005 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3006 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3007 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3008 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3009 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3010 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3011
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003012- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3013 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3014 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3015 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3016 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3017 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3018 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3019 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003020
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003021- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3022 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3023 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3024 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3025 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003026 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3027 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3028 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3029 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3030 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3031 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3032 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003033
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003034- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3035 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3036
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003037- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3038 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3039 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3040 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3041 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3042 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3043 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3044 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3045 to Zack Weinberg!
3046
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003047- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3048 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3049 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3050 type. This has been fixed now.
3051
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003052- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3053 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3054 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3055
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003056- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3057 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3058 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3059 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3060 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3061 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3062 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3063 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003064 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003065
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003066- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3067 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3068 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003069
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003070- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3071 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3072 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3073 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3074 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3075 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3076 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3077 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003078 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003079 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3080 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3081
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003082- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3083 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3084 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3085 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3086 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3087 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3088 this.)
3089
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003090- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3091 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003092 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003093 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003094 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3095 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003096 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3097 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003098
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003099- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3100 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3101 currently running.
3102
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003103- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3104 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3105 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3106 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3107
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003108- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3109 as directory names.
3110
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003111- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3112 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3113
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003114- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3115 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3116
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003117- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003118 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3119 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003120
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003121- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3122 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3123 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3124 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3125 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3126
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003127- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3128 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3129 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3130 removed.
3131
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003132- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3133 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3134 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3135
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003136- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3137 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3138 to __debug__.
3139
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003140- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3141 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3142 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3143
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003144- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3145 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3146 deprecated now.
3147
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003148- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3149 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3150 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003151
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003152- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3153 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3154 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3155 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3156 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003157
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003158- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3159 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3160
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003161- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3162 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3163 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003164 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003165 is backward compatible.
3166
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003167- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3168 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3169 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3170 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3171 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3172
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003173- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3174 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3175 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3176 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3177 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3178 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003179
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003180- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3181 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3182
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003183- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3184 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3185
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003186- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3187 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3188 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3189 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3190 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3191
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003192- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3193 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3194 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3195
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003196- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003197 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3198
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003199- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3200 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3201 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003202
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003203- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3204 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3205
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003206- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3207 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3208 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3209
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003210- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3211
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003212Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003213-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003214
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003215- Added three operators to the operator module:
3216 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3217 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3218 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3219
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003220- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3221
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003222- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3223 archives.
3224
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003225- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3226 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3227 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3228
3229 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3230
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003231- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3232 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3233 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003234 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003235
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003236- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3237 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3238 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3239 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003240 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3241 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3242 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3243 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003244
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003245- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3246 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003247
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003248- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3249
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003250- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3251 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3252
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003253- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3254 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3255 supported.
3256
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003257- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3258
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003259- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3260 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003261
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003262- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3263 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3264
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003265- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3266
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003267- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3268 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3269
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003270- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3271 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3272 functions but callable type objects.
3273
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003274- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003275 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003276 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003277
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003278- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3279 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003280
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003281- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3282 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003283
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003284- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3285 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3286 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3287 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3288
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003289- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3290 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003291
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003292- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3293 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3294 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3295 and __imul__.
3296
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003297- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003298 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3299 is called.
3300
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003301- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3302 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3303 interpreter was compiled.
3304
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003305- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3306 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3307 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003308 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003309 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3310 1, not 2.
3311
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003312- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3313 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3314 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3315 limit.
3316
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003317- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3318 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3319 bug #623464.
3320
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003321- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3322 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3323 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3324 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3325
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003326Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003327-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003328
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003329- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3330
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003331- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3332 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3333 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3334 with Python 2.3a2.
3335
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003336- os.path exposes getctime.
3337
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003338- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003339 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003340 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003341 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003342 unit tests of floating point results.
3343
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003344- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3345 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3346 has been increased.
3347
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003348- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3349 executed.
3350
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003351- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3352 postinstallation script.
3353
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003354- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3355 test the current module.
3356
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003357- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003358 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3359 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3360 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3361 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3362
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003363- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003364 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003365 Ward's Optik package.
3366
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003367- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3368 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3369 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3370 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3371
3372- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3373 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003374 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003375
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003376- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3377 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3378 shelf are binary pickles.
3379
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003380- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3381 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3382
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003383- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3384 modules are iterators now.
3385
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003386- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3387 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3388 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3389 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3390 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3391 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003392
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003393- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3394 with their entity value.
3395
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003396- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3397
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003398- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3399 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003400
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003401- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3402 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003403 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003404
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003405- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3406 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3407 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3408 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3409 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3410 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3411 main():
3412
3413 import locale
3414 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3415
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003416- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3417 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3418
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003419- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3420 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3421 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3422 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3423 to the new standard.
3424
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003425- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3426 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3427 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3428 an extension to the database.
3429
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003430- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3431 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3432 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3433 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003434 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003435
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003436- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003437 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003438
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003439- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3440 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3441 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3442 bounded integers.
3443
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003444- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3445 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3446 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3447 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3448 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3449 in existence.
3450
3451 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3452 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3453 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3454 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3455 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3456 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3457
3458 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3459 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3460 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3461 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3462
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003463- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3464 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3465 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3466
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003467- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3468
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003469- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3470 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3471 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3472 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3473
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003474- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3475 argument.
3476
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003477- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3478 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3479 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3480 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3481 [SF patch 560794].
3482
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003483- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3484 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3485 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003486 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3487 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3488 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003489
3490- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3491 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003492
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003493- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3494 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3495 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3496 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003497
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003498- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3499 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3500 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3501 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3502 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3503
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003504- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003505
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003506- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3507
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003508- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3509 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3510 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3511 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3512 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3513 identical to None.
3514
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003515- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3516 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3517 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3518 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3519 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3520 results now.
3521
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003522- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3523 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3524
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003525- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3526 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3527 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3528 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3529 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3530 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3531 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3532 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3533
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003534- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3535
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003536- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3537 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3538
3539- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3540 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3541 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3542 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3543 and other systems.
3544
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003545- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3546 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3547 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3548 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 +00003549 work well with these.
3550
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003551- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3552
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003553- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003554 connections.
3555
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003556- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3557 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3558 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3559
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003560- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3561 sets
3562
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003563- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3564 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3565 name.
3566
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003567- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3568 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3569 passed in.
3570
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003571- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003572 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003573 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3574 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003575
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003576- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3577
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003578- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3579
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003580- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3581 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3582 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3583
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003584- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3585 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3586 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3587 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003588 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003589
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003590- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003591 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003592 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003593
3594- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3595 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3596 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3597
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003598- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003599 the value of its expression argument.
3600
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003601- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3602 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3603 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3604
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003605- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3606 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3607 skipstone browser was included.
3608
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003609- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3610 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3611
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003612Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003613-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003614
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003615- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3616 names in addition to accepting file names.
3617
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003618- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3619 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3620 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3621 still used and useful.)
3622
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003623- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3624 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3625 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3626 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003627
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003628- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3629 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3630 the generated binary.
3631
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003632Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003633-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003634
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003635- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3636
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003637- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3638 except in the hands of experts.
3639
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003640- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003641 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3642 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3643 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003644
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003645- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3646 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3647 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3648 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3649 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3650 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3651 builds.
3652
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003653- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3654 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3655 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3656 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3657 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3658 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3659 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3660 new type.
3661
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003662- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003663
3664 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3665 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3666 positive infinities.
3667
3668 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3669 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3670 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3671 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3672 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3673 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3674 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3675
3676 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3677
3678 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3679
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003680- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3681 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3682 size of the executable.
3683
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003684- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3685 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3686 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3687 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003688
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003689- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3690
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003691- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3692 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3693 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003694
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003695- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3696 well as Unix.
3697
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003698- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3699 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3700 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3701 modules in the README file for details.
3702
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003703C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003704-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003705
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003706- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3707 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003708 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003709 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003710 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003711
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003712- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3713 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3714 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3715 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3716 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3717 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003718 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003719 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3720 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3721 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3722 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3723 aligned.)
3724
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003725- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3726 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3727 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3728
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003729- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3730 level.
3731
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003732- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3733 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3734 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3735 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3736 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3737
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003738- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3739 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3740 code.
3741
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003742- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3743 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3744 adjusting for negative indices.
3745
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003746- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3747 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3748 object.
3749
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003750- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3751 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3752 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3753
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003754- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3755 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003756
3757- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3758
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003759- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3760 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3761 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3762 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3763
3764- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3765
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003766- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003767
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003768- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003769 without going through the buffer API.
3770
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003771- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003772
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003773- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3774 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3775 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3776 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3777
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003778- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3779 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3780
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003781- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003782 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3783
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003784New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003785-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003786
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003787- OpenVMS is now supported.
3788
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003789- AtheOS is now supported.
3790
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003791- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3792
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003793- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3794
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003795Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003796-----
3797
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003798- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3799 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3800 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003801
3802Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003803-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003804
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003805- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3806 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3807 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3808 bugs.
3809 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003810 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003811 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3812 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003813 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003814
3815- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003816 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003817
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003818- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3819 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3820
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003821- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3822 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003823 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003824 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3825
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003826- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3827 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3828 use files" uninstall option).
3829
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003830- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3831
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003832- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3833 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3834
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003835- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3836 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3837 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3838
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003839- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3840 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3841 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3842 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3843 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003844 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3845 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3846 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003847
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003848- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003849 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003850 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3851 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3852 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3853 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3854 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3855 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3856 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3857 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3858 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3859 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3860 work around.
3861
3862- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3863 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3864 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3865 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3866 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3867 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3868 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3869 specified with O_CREAT too).
3870
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003871Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003872----
3873
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003874- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003875
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003876- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3877 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3878 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3879
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003880- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3881 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3882 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3883
3884- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3885 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3886 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3887 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3888 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3889 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3890 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3891 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003892
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003893- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3894 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3895 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003896
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003897- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3898 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3899 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3900 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3901 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003902
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003903- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3904 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3905 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003906
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003907- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3908 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003909
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003910- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3911 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3912 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3913 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3914 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003915
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003916- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3917 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3918 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3919
3920- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3921 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3922 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003923
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003924- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3925 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3926 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3927 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003928 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003929
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003930- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3931 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003932
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003933- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3934 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003935
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003936- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003937 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003938 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3939 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003940
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003941
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003942What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003943===============================
3944
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003945*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3946
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003947Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003948--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003949
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003950- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3951 with a custom metaclass.
3952
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003953Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003954-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003955
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003956- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3957 are proxies.
3958
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003959Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003960-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003961
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003962- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3963 very short strings.
3964
3965- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3966 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3967 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3968 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3969 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3970
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003971Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003972-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003973
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003974- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3975 close or delete time).
3976
3977- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3978 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3979
3980- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3981
3982- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003983 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003984
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003985Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003986-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003987
3988Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003989-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003990
3991C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003992-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003993
3994New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003995-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003996
3997Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003998-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003999
4000Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004001-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004002
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004003- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4004
4005- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4006 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4007
4008- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4009 deleted at process exit time.
4010
4011- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4012 in backslash.
4013
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004014Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004015----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004016
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004017- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4018 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4019 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4020
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004021
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004022What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004023===========================
4024
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004025*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4026
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004027Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004028--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004029
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004030- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4031 been extensively updated. See
4032
4033 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4034
4035 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4036
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004037- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4038 deleted!
4039
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004040- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4041 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4042 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4043 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4044 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4045
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004046- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4047
4048 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4049 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4050
4051 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4052 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4053 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4054 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4055 supported anyway.
4056
4057 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4058 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4059
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004060- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4061 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4062 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4063 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4064 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004065
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004066- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4067 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4068 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4069
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004070Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004071-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004072
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004073- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4074 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4075 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4076 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4077 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4078 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004079 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4080 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4081 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4082 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004083
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004084- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4085 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4086 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4087
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004088Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004089-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004090
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004091- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4092
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004093Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004094-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004095
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004096- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4097 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4098 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4099 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4100 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4101 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4102
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004103- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4104
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004105- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4106
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004107- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4108
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004109- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4110 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4111 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4112
4113- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4114
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004115Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004116-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004117
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004118- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4119 off a search on Google.
4120
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004121Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004122-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004123
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004124- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4125 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4126 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4127 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4128 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4129 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4130 other platforms should do likewise.
4131
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004132- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4133 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4134 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4135
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004136C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004137-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004138
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004139- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4140 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4141 producing key-value pairs.
4142
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004143- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004144 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004145 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4146 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4147 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4148 previously went unchallenged.
4149
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004150New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004151-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004152
4153Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004154-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004155
4156Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004157-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004158
4159Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004160----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004161
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004162- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4163 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004164
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004165- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4166 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4167 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4168 home.
4169
4170
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004171What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004172===========================
4173
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004174*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4175
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004176Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004177--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004178
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004179- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4180 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004181
4182 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004183 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004184
4185 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4186 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004187 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004188 This needs to be documented.
4189
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004190- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4191 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4192
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004193- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4194 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4195 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4196
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004197- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4198 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4199
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004200- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4201 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4202 class forbids it).
4203
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004204- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4205 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4206 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4207
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004208- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4209
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004210Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004211-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004212
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004213- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4214 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004215 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004216
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004217- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4218 (like 1 + '').
4219
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004220Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004221-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004222
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004223- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4224 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4225 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4226 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004227 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004228 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4229
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004230- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4231 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4232 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4233 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4234
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004235- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4236 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004237 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4238 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4239 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004240
4241- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4242 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004243
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004244- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4245 bytes on its input.
4246
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004247Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004248-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004249
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004250- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004251 convenience function.
4252
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004253- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4254 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4255 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004256 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4257 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4258 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4259 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4260 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4261 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004262
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004263- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4264 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4265 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4266 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4267
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004268- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4269 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4270 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4271
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004272- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4273 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4274 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4275 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4276
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004277- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4278 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004279 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004280 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4281 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4282 new -l and -e options.
4283
4284- statcache is now deprecated.
4285
4286- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4287 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004288 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004289 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4290 time properly taken into account.
4291
4292- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4293 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4294 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4295 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4296
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004297Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004298-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004299
4300Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004301-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004302
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004303- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4304 is built with libdb3 if available.
4305
4306- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4307
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004308C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004309-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004310
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004311- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4312 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4313 PySequence_Size().
4314
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004315- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4316
4317- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4318 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4319 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4320
4321- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4322 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4323
4324- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4325 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4326
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004327New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004328-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004329
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004330- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4331 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4332
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004333- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4334 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4335
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004336- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4337
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004338Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004339-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004340
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004341- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4342 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4343
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004344Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004345-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004346
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004347Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004348----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004349
4350- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4351 removed completely in the next release.
4352
4353- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4354 OSX.
4355
4356- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4357 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4358
4359- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4360
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004361
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004362What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004363===========================
4364
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004365*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4366
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004367Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004368--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004369
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004370- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004371 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004372 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004373 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4374 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004375 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4376 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004377 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4378 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004379
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004380- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4381 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4382
4383- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4384 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4385
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004386Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004387-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004388
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004389- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4390 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4391 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4392 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4393 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4394 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4395 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4396 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4397
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004398- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4399 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4400 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4401 example).
4402
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004403- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004404 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004405 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004406 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004407
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004408- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4409 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4410 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004411 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004412
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004413- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4414 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4415 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4416 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4417 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4418 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4419
4420 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4421
4422 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4423
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004424Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004425-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004426
4427- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4428
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004429- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4430
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004431- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4432 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004433
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004434- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4435 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4436 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4437 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4438 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4439 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004440 attributes.
4441
4442- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4443 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4444 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004445
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004446- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4447 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4448 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004449
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004450- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4451 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4452 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004453 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4454 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4455
4456- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4457 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004458
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004459Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004460-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004461
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004462- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4463 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4464
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004465- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4466 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4467 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4468 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4469
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004470- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4471 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4472 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4473 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4474
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004475 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4476 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4477 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4478 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4479 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4480 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4481 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4482 without losing information).
4483
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004484- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004485 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4486 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4487 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4488 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4489 module).
4490
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004491 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004492 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4493 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4494 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4495 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004496
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004497- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004498 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4499 encoding.
4500
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004501- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4502 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4503
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004504- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004505 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4506
4507- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4508 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4509 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4510 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4511
4512- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4513
4514- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4515 ON, and OFF.
4516
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004517- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4518 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4519
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004520Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004521-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004522
4523- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4524 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4525 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004526
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004527- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4528 been added: -X and -E.
4529
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004530Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004531-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004532
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004533- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4534 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4535
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004536C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004537-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004538
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004539- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4540 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4541 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4542 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4543 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4544
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004545- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4546 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4547 as long) arguments.
4548
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004549- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4550 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4551 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4552 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4553 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4554 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4555
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004556- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4557 input.
4558
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004559New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004560-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004561
4562Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004563-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004564
4565Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004566-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004567
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004568- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4569 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4570 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4571
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004572- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4573 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4574 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004575 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004576
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004577 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4578 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4579 import signal
4580 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004581
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004582 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004583 while 1:
4584 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004585 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004586 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4587 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4588 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4589 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004590
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004591
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004592What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4593===========================
4594
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004595*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4596
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004597Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004598--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004599
4600- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4601 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4602 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4603
4604- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4605 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4606 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4607 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4608 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4609 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4610 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004611
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004612- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004613 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004614 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4615 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4616 associate a docstring with a property.
4617
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004618- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4619 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4620 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4621 other built-in object types.
4622
4623- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4624 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4625 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4626 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4627 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4628
4629- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4630 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4631
4632- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4633 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004634 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004635 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4636 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4637 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4638 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4639 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4640
4641- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4642 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4643 class.
4644
4645- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4646 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4647 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4648 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4649
4650- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4651 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4652 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4653 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4654
4655- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4656 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4657
4658- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4659 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4660 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4661 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4662 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004663 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004664 with the same value as s.
4665
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004666- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4667
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004668Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004669----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004670
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004671- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4672
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004673- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4674 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4675 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4676 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4677 objects.
4678
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004679- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4680 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004681 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4682 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4683
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004684- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4685 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4686 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4687
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004688Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004689-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004690
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004691- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4692 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4693 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4694 by the instances.
4695
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004696- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4697 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4698 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4699
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004700- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4701 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4702 before the entire comparison is complete.
4703
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004704- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4705 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4706 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4707
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004708- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4709 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4710 getwriter().
4711
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004712- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4713 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4714
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004715- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004716 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4717 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4718
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004719- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4720 iterable object.
4721
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004722- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4723 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004724
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004725- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4726 authentication.
4727
4728- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4729 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004730
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004731- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004732 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4733 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4734 a sample driver.)
4735
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004736Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004737-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004738
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004739- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4740 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4741 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4742 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4743 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4744 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4745 kernel has large file support.
4746
4747- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4748 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4749 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4750 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4751 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4752
4753- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4754 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4755 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4756
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004757C API
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- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4761 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4762
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004763New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004764-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004765
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004766- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4767 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4768
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004769Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004770-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004771
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004772- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4773 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4774 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4775 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4776 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4777
4778- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4779 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4780 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4781 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4782
4783- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4784 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4785
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004786Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004787-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004788
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004789- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004790 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4791 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004792
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004793
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004794What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4795===========================
4796
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004797*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4798
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004799Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004800----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004801
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004802- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4803 big to represent as a C double.
4804
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004805- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4806 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4807 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4808 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4809 restriction).
4810
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004811- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4812 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4813 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4814 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4815 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4816
4817 >>> dir([])
4818 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4819 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4820 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4821 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4822 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4823 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4824 'reverse', 'sort']
4825
4826 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4827
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004828- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004829 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4830 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4831 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4832 OverflowError exception.
4833
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004834- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004835 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004836 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4837 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4838 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4839 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4840 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004841 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004842 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4843 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4844
4845 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4846 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4847 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4848 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004849
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004850- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004851 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4852 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4853 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4854 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4855 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4856 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4857 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4858 once it is created.
4859
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004860- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4861 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4862 (key, value) pairs.
4863
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004864- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004865 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4866 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4867
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004868- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4869 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4870 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4871 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4872 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004873
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004874- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004875 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4876 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4877
4878 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4879
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004880- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004881 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4882
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004883Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004884-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004885
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004886- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004887 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4888 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004889
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004890- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4891 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4892 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4893 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4894 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4895 in this area anymore).
4896
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004897- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4898 threading.Timer.
4899
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004900- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4901 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4902
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004903- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004904 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4905
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004906- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004907 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4908 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4909 converted to Python longs.
4910
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004911- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004912 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4913
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004914- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4915 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4916 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4917
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004918Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004919-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004920
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004921- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4922 division operators as per PEP 238.
4923
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004924Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004925-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004926
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004927- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4928 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4929 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4930 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4931
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004932C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004933-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004934
4935- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004936
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004937- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4938 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004939 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004940
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004941 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4942 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004943 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004944 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004945
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004946- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004947 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4948 module:
4949
4950 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004951
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004952 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4953 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004954
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004955 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4956 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004957
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004958 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4959
4960 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4961
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004962- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004963 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4964 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4965 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004966
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004967New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004968-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004969
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004970- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4971 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4972 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4973 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4974 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004975
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004976Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004977-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004978
4979Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004980-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004981
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004982- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4983 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4984 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4985 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004986 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4987 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4988 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4989 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4990 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004991
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004992- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004993 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4994
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004995
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004996What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4997===========================
4998
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004999*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5000
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005001Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005002-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005003
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005004- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5005 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5006
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005007- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5008 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5009 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005010
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005011- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5012 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5013 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5014 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005015
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005016- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5017
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005018- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005019
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005020Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005021-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005022
5023- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005024 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005025 the module docstring for details.
5026
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005027Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005028-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005029
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005030- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005031 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5032 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5033 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005034
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005035- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5036 Nick Mathewson.
5037
5038Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005039----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005040
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005041- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5042 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5043 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5044 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5045 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5046 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5047 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5048 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5049
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005050- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5051 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5052 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5053 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5054
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005055- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5056 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5057 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5058 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5059 come a long way).
5060
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005061- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5062 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5063 write filters for these warnings).
5064
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005065- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5066 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5067 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5068 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5069 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5070
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005071- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5072 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5073 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5074 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5075 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5076 older distribution.
5077
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005078Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005079-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005080
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005081- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5082 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005083 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005084
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005085- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5086 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5087 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5088
5089- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5090
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005091- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5092
5093- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5094
5095- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5096
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005097- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005098
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005099- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5100
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005101New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005102-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005103
5104C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005105-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005106
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005107- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5108 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5109 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5110 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5111 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5112 against buffer overruns.
5113
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005114- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005115 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5116 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005117 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5118 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5119 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5120
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005121- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5122 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5123 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5124 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5125 deprecated.
5126
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005127Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005128-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005129
5130- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5131 relevant is found.
5132
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005133
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005134What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005135===========================
5136
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005137*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5138
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005139Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005140----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005141
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005142- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5143 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5144 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5145 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5146 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5147 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5148 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5149 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005150 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005151 repaired.
5152
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005153- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005154 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005155 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5156 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5157 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5158 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5159 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5160 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5161 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5162 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5163
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005164- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5165 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5166 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5167 leading BMO character).
5168
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005169- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5170 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5171 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5172
5173 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5174 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5175 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005176
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005177 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5178 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5179 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5180 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5181 for various simple to use conversions.
5182
5183 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5184 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5185
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005186 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5187 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5188 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5189 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5190 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5191 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5192 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5193 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5194 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5195 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5196 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5197 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5198 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5199 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5200 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005201
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005202- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5203 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5204 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005205 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005206 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005207
5208 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005209 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5210 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5211 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5212 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5213 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005214 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5215 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005216
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005217 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5218 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5219 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005220 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005221
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005222- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5223 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5224 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5225 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5226 floating arithmetic,
5227
5228 x = 9007199254740992.0
5229 print long(x)
5230
5231 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5232 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5233 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5234 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5235 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5236 functions are of good quality).
5237
5238 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5239 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5240 algorithms to break.
5241
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005242- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5243 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5244 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5245 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5246 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5247 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5248 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5249 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5250 order.
5251
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005252- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5253 operation along the most common code paths.
5254
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005255- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5256 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5257
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005258- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5259 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5260 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5261 {}.update(UserDict())
5262
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005263- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5264 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5265 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5266 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5267 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5268 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5269 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5270 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5271
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005272- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005273 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005274
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005275 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005276 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5277 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005278 join() method of strings
5279 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005280 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5281 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005282 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005283 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005284
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005285- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5286 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5287
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005288- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5289 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5290
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005291- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5292 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5293 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5294 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5295
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005296- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5297 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005298 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005299 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5300 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005301
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005302- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5303
5304
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005305Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005306-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005307
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005308- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005309 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005310 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5311 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5312
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005313- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5314 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5315
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005316- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5317 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5318 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5319 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5320
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005321- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5322 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5323 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5324
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005325- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5326
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005327- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5328
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005329- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5330 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5331 that are still imported into string.py).
5332
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005333- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5334
5335- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5336 Now it does.
5337
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005338- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5339
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005340- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5341 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5342 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5343 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5344 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005345 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5346 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005347
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005348- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5349 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5350 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5351 'help(object)'.
5352
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005353Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005354-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005355
5356- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005357 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005358 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5359 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5360
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005361- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005362 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5363 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005364
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005365C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005366-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005367
5368- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5369 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005370
5371----
5372
5373**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**