blob: c6092bc293ae15e725243002d7dc8b76d10e27a4 [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
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000015- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
16
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000017- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
18 and long longs.
19
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000020- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
21 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
22 message in this case.
23
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000024- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
25 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
26 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
27 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
28 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
29
30- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
31
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000032- Speed up some Unicode operations.
33
34- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
35
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000036- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000037 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
38
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000039- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
40
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000041- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
42 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
43
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000044- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
45
46- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
47
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000048- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
49 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
50 was empty.
51
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000052- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
53 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
54
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000055- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000056 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000057
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000058- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
59 codes.
60
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000061- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
62 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
63 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
64
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000065- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
66 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
67
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000068- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000069 (fixes bug #1119418).
70
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000071- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
72
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000073- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
74 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
75
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000076- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
77 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
78 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
79
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000080- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
81
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000082- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
83 reference counts in some error exit cases.
84
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000085- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
86 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
87 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
88 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
89 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
90 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
91 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
92 realloc.
93
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000094- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
95 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
96
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000097- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
98 like their int counterparts.
99
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000100- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
101 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
102 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
103 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
104 for a longer write-up of the problem).
105
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000106- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
107 serializing floats.
108
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000109- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
110 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
111 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
112
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000113- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
114 278.
115
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000116- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
117 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
118 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
119 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000120 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000121 PyNumber_*().
122 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
123
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000124- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
125 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
126 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
127 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
128
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000129- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
130 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
131 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
132 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
133 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
134
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000135- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
136 disabled caused a crash.
137
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000138- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
139 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
140
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000141- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000142 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
143
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000144- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
145
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000146- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000147 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
148 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
149 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000150
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000151- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
152
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000153- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
154 returning None.
155
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000156- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000157 ('\') with a specific error message.
158
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000159- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
160
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000161- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
162 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
163
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000164- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000165 an ferror() call.
166
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000167- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
168 list.sort().
169
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000170- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
171 (2+3) --> (5).
172
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000173- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
174
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000175- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
176 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000177
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000178- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
179 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
180 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
181
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000182- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
183 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
184 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
185
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000186Extension Modules
187-----------------
188
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000189- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
190
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000191- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
192
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000193- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
194
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000195- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
196 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
197
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000198- Get bsddb module to build with BSD DB version 3.2
199
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000200- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
201 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
202
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000203- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
204
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000205- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
206 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
207
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000208- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
209 returns in cStringIO.c.
210
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000211- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
212 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
213
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000214- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
215
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000216- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
217
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000218- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
219 the file system encoding.
220
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000221- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
222 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000223
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000224- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
225
226- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000227 line without newlines.
228
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000229- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
230 on Windows.
231
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000232- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000233 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
234
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000235- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
236 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
237 for large or negative values.
238
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000239- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000240 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000241
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000242- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
243
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000244- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
245 if available on the platform.
246
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000247- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
248 available on the platform.
249
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000250- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
251 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
252
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000253- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
254
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000255- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
256 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
257 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
258
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000259- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
260
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000261- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
262 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
263
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000264- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000265 file size.
266
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000267- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
268
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000269- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
270 {remove_history,replace_history}
271
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000272- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
273 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000274
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000275- stat_float_times is now True.
276
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000277- array.array objects are now picklable.
278
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000279- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
280 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
281
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000282- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
283 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
284 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
285
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000286- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
287 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000288
289Library
290-------
291
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000292- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
293
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000294- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
295
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000296- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
297 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
298 illegal argument)
299
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000300- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
301 is an error in the format string.
302
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000303- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
304
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000305- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000306 "parent" argument.
307
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000308- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
309 for padding.
310
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000311- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
312 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
313
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000314- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
315 to get the correct encoding.
316
317- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
318 languages.
319
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000320- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
321
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000322- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
323
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000324- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
325
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000326- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
327 functionality.
328
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000329- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
330
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000331- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
332 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
333
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000334- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
335 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
336 match the Content-Length header.
337
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000338- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
339
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000340- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
341 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000342 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000343
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000344- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
345
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000346- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
347
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000348- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
349 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
350
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000351- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
352 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
353 Tkdnd.
354
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000355- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
356 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
357
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000358- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
359 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
360
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000361- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000362 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
363
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000364- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
365 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
366
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000367- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
368 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
369
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000370- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000371 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000372
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000373- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
374
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000375- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
376 error messages.
377
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000378- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
379
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000380- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
381 Bug #1224621.
382
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000383- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
384 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
385 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
386 terminates by raising StopIteration.
387
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000388- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
389
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000390- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
391 component of the path.
392
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000393- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
394 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
395 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
396 class at all.
397
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000398- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
399 files to PyPI.
400
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000401- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
402 them to PyPI.
403
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000404- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
405 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
406 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
407 work as expected.
408
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000409- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
410 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
411
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000412- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000413 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
414
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000415- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
416
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000417- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
418 to build.
419
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000420- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
421 symbolic links on Windows.
422
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000423- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000424 profile.py if available.
425
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000426- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
427
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000428- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
429 in LWPCookieJar.
430
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000431- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
432
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000433- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
434
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000435- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
436
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000437- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
438
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000439- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
440
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000441- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
442
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000443- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
444
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000445- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
446
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000447- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
448 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
449 be exploited in various ways.
450
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000451- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
452 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
453
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000454- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
455 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
456
Andrew M. Kuchling427aedb2005-12-04 17:13:12 +0000457- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000458 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
459
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000460- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
461
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000462- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
463
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000464- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
465
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000466- Enhancements to the csv module:
467
468 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000469 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000470 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000471 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
472 reporting.
473 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
474 dictates.
475 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000476 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000477 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000478 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
479 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000480 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
481 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000482 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000483 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
484 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
485 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
486 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
487 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
488 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
489 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
490 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
491 without first creating a dialect class.
492 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
493 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
494 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000495 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000496 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
497 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000498 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
499 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
500 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
501 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000502 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
503 This has been fixed.
504
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000505- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
506 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
507 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
508 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
509
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000510- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
511
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000512- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
513 (Bug #951915).
514
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000515- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
516 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
517 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000518 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000519
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000520- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
521
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000522- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
523 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
524
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000525- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
526
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000527- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
528
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000529- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
530
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000531- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
532
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000533- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
534
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000535- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
536 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
537 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
538
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000539- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000540 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000541
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000542- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
543 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
544 tokenizer with very long source lines.
545
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000546- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
547 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
548
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000549- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
550 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000551
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000552- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
553 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
554
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000555- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
556 correctly.
557
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000558- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
559 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
560 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
561 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
562 between two lines.
563
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000564- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
565 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
566 handlers.
567
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000568- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000569 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
570 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000571
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000572- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
573 considering it exactly like a '*'.
574
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000575- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
576 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000577
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000578- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
579
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000580Build
581-----
582
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000583- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
584 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
585
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000586- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
587 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
588
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000589- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
590 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
591 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000592 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000593
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000594- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
595 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
596 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
597
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000598- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
599
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000600- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
601 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
602
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000603- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
604 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
605 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
606 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
607 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
608 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
609 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
610 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
611
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000612- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
613 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
614 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
615 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
616
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000617
618C API
619-----
620
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000621- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
622
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000623- Removed PyRange_New().
624
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000625- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
626 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
627 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
628 mappings.
629
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000630
631Tests
632-----
633
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000634- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000635
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000636- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
637 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
638
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000639
640Documentation
641-------------
642
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000643- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
644
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000645- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
646
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000647- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
648
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000649- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
650
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000651- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
652
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000653- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
654
655- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
656
657- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
658
659- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
660
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000661- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
662 Closes bug #1166582.
663
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000664- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
665 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
666 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
667
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000668Mac
669---
670
671
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000672New platforms
673-------------
674
675- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
676
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000677
678Tools/Demos
679-----------
680
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000681- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
682 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
683 source files that need an encoding declaration.
684 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
685
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000686- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
687
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000688- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000689
690
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000691What's New in Python 2.4 final?
692===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000693
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000694*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000695
696Core and builtins
697-----------------
698
699- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
700 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
701 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
702
703
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000704What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
705==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000706
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000707*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000708
709Core and builtins
710-----------------
711
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000712- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
713 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
714 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
715
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000716
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000717Library
718-------
719
720- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
721 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
722 raised is re-raised.
723
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000724- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
725 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
726
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000727- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
728 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
729 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
730 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
731 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
732 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
733 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
734 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
735 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
736 by the slice are recomputed now.
737
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000738- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000739
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000740Build
741-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000742
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000743- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
744 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
745 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000746
747C API
748-----
749
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000750- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
751
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000752
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000753What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
754================================
755
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000756*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000757
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000758License
759-------
760
761The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
762is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
763changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
764Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
765intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
766durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
767the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
768License::
769
770 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
771
772says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
773to Python 2.1.1.
774
775The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
776License Version 2.
777
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000778Core and builtins
779-----------------
780
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000781- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
782 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
783 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
784 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
785 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
786 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
787 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000788 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000789 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
790 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
791
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000792- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000793
794Extension Modules
795-----------------
796
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000797- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
798 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
799 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
800 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000801
802Library
803-------
804
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000805- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
806 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
807 returned.
808
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000809- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
810
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000811- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
812 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
813
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000814- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
815
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000816- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
817 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000818
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000819- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
820
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000821- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
822
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000823- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000824 the source code is updated and reloaded.
825
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000826Build
827-----
828
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000829- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000830
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000831What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
832================================
833
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000834*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000835
836Core and builtins
837-----------------
838
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000839- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000840 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
841
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000842- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
843 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
844 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
845 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
846
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000847- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
848 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
849
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000850- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
851 constant.
852
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000853- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
854 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
855 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
856 large), and to anomalies such as
857 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
858 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
859 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
860 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000861
862Extension modules
863-----------------
864
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000865- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
866 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000867 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
868 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
869 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000870
871Library
872-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000873
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000874- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000875 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000876 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
877 --swig-cpp.
878
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000879- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
880 it is set.
881
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000882- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000883
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000884- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
885 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
886 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
887 Closes bug #1039270.
888
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000889- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000890
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000891 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000892 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
893 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
894 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
895 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
896 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
897 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
898 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
899 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
900 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
901 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
902 + Updates to documentation.
903
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000904- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
905 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
906 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
907 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
908
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000909- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000910
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000911- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
912 applications should use the getmember function.
913
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000914- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
915
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000916- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
917 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
918 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
919 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
920 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
921 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
922 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
923 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
924 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
925
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000926- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
927 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000928 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000929
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000930- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
931 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
932 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
933 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
934 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
935 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
936 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
937 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000938
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000939- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
940 the new public features (of which there are many).
941
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000942- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000943 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
944 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
945 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
946 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000947 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000948
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000949- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
950
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000951- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
952 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
953 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
954 options.
955
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000956- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
957 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
958 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
959 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
960 conditions under which non-string values work.
961
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000962Build
963-----
964
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000965- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
966 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
967 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
968
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000969- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
970 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
971 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
972 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
973 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000974
975C API
976-----
977
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000978- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
979 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
980
981- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
982
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000983- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
984 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
985 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
986 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
987 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
988 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
989 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
990 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
991 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
992
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000993- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
994
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000995- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
996 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
997 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000998
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000999Tests
1000-----
1001
1002- test__locale ported to unittest
1003
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001004Mac
1005---
1006
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001007- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1008 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1009 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001010
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001011Tools/Demos
1012-----------
1013
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001014- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1015 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1016 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1017 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1018 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001019
1020
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001021What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1022=================================
1023
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001024*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001025
1026Core and builtins
1027-----------------
1028
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001029- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001030 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1031
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001032- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1033 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1034 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1035 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1036 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1037 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1038 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1039 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001040 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1041 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1042 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1043 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1044 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001045
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001046- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1047 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1048 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1049 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1050 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1051
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001052- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1053
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001054- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1055 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1056
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001057- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1058 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1059 modified the list.
1060
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001061- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1062 functions is now writable.
1063
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001064- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1065 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1066 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1067 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1068
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001069- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1070 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1071 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1072 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1073 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001074
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001075- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1076 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1077
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001078Extension modules
1079-----------------
1080
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001081- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1082
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001083- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1084 data.
1085
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001086- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1087 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1088 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1089 supposed to have been truncated away.
1090
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001091- Added socket.socketpair().
1092
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001093- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1094 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1095
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001096- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001097 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1098
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001099Library
1100-------
1101
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001102- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001103 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001104
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001105- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1106 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1107
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001108- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1109 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1110
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001111- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1112
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001113- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1114 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001115
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001116- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1117 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1118
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001119- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1120
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001121- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1122
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001123- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1124
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001125- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1126 Percivall.
1127
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001128- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1129 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1130
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001131- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1132 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1133 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001134 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001135
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001136- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1137 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1138 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1139 and exponent.
1140
1141- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1142
1143- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001144 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001145 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1146
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001147- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1148 to the readline module.
1149
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001150- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001151 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1152 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001153
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001154- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1155 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1156 contains symlinks.
1157
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001158- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1159 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1160
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001161- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1162 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1163 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1164
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001165- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1166 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1167 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1168 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1169 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1170 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1171 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1172 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1173 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1174 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1175 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1176 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1177 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1178
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001179- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1180
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001181Tools/Demos
1182-----------
1183
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001184- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1185 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1186
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001187- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1188
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001189Build
1190-----
1191
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001192- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1193 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1194 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1195 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1196 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1197 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1198 plans to do so.
1199
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001200- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1201 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1202
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001203- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1204 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1205
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001206- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1207 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1208
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001209- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1210 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1211
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001212- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1213 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1214
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001215C API
1216-----
1217
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001218..
1219
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001220Documentation
1221-------------
1222
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001223- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1224 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1225
1226- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1227 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1228 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001229
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001230New platforms
1231-------------
1232
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001233- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1234
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001235Tests
1236-----
1237
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001238..
1239
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001240Windows
1241-------
1242
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001243- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1244 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1245 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1246 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1247 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1248 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1249 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1250 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1251 the problem.
1252
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001253Mac
1254---
1255
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001256..
1257
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001258
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001259What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1260=================================
1261
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001262*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001263
1264Core and builtins
1265-----------------
1266
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001267- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1268 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1269 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1270 sensitive code.
1271
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001272- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001273 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001274
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001275 @staticmethod
1276 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001277
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001278 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001279
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001280- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1281 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1282 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1283 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1284 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1285 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1286 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1287 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1288 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1289 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1290 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1291
1292 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1293 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1294 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1295 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1296 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1297 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1298 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1299
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001300- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1301 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1302
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001303- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001304 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001305
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001306- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001307 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001308 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1309
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001310- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001311 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1312 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1313
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001314- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1315 types that support garbage collection.
1316
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001317- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1318
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001319- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1320 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1321 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1322 Jython.
1323
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001324- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1325
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001326- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1327 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1328
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001329- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1330 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1331 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001332
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001333- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1334 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1335 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1336
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001337Extension modules
1338-----------------
1339
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001340- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1341
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001342Library
1343-------
1344
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001345- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1346 TIS-620
1347
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001348- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1349 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1350 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1351 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1352 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1353 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1354 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1355 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1356 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1357 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1358
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001359- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1360
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001361- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1362 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1363 same as when the argument is omitted).
1364 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1365
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001366- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1367
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001368- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1369 schemes are offered.
1370
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001371- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1372
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001373- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1374 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1375 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1376
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001377- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1378
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001379- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1380 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1381
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001382- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1383 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1384 when dummy_threading is being used.
1385
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001386- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1387 from a tarfile.
1388
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001389- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001390 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001391
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001392- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1393 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1394 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1395 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1396
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001397- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1398 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1399
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001400- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1401 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1402 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1403 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1404 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1405 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1406 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1407 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1408 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1409 by some other method in progress).
1410
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001411- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1412 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1413 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001414
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001415- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1416
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001417- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1418 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1419 AM Kuchling.
1420
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001421- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1422 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1423 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1424
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001425- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1426 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1427 instead of unsigned.
1428
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001429- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001430 no longer part of the public API.
1431
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001432- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1433 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1434 string methods of the same name).
1435
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001436- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001437 SF patch 945642.
1438
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001439- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1440
1441 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1442
1443 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1444 DocTestSuites.
1445
1446- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1447 that provide thread-local data.
1448
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001449- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1450 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1451
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001452- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1453
1454- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1455 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1456 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1457
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001458- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1459
1460 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1461 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1462 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001463
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001464 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1465 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1466 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1467 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1468
1469 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1470 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1471
1472 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1473 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1474 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1475 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1476
1477 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1478 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1479 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1480 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1481 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1482
1483 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1484 wrapping help output.
1485
1486 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1487 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1488 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001489
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001490C API
1491-----
1492
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001493- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1494 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1495 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1496 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1497 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1498 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1499 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1500 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1501 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1502 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1503 its visible semantics have not changed.
1504
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001505- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1506 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1507
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001508Documentation
1509-------------
1510
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001511- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001512
1513 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001514 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001515
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001516 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001517
1518 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1519
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001520- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001521
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001522Tests
1523-----
1524
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001525- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001526 platforms that use the Makefile.
1527
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001528- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1529 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1530 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1531
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001532
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001533What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1534=================================
1535
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001536*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001537
1538Core and builtins
1539-----------------
1540
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001541- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1542 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1543 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1544 objects now (one object instead of three).
1545
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001546- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1547 Windows DLLs.
1548
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001549- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1550 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001551
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001552- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1553 a new .pyc magic.
1554
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001555- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1556 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1557 be there.
1558
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001559- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1560 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1561 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1562
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001563- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1564 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1565 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1566
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001567- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1568
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001569- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1570 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1571 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001572
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001573- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1574 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1575
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001576- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1577
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001578- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001579 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001580
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001581- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1582
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001583- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1584
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001585- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1586 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1587
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001588- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1589 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1590 Fixes bug #858016 .
1591
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001592- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1593 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1594 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1595
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001596- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1597 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1598 improves their performance (about 35%).
1599
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001600- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1601 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1602 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1603
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001604- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1605 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1606 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1607 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1608
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001609- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1610 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001611 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001612 length is not known).
1613
1614- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1615 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001616 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1617 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001618 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1619
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001620- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1621 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1622
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001623- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1624 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1625 keyword arguments.
1626
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001627- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1628 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1629 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1630
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001631- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1632 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1633 cases.
1634
1635- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1636 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1637 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1638 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1639 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1640 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1641 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1642 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1643 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1644 a release build.
1645
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001646- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1647 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1648
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001649- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001650 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001651
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001652- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1653 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1654 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1655 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1656 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1657 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1658 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1659 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1660 destroyed.
1661
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001662- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1663 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1664 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1665 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1666 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1667 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1668 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1669 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1670
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001671- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1672 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1673 character other than a space.
1674
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001675- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1676 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1677 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1678 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1679 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1680 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1681 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1682 attributes with the same name.
1683
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001684- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1685 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1686 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1687 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1688 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1689 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1690 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1691 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1692 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1693 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1694 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1695 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1696 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1697 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001698
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001699- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1700 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1701 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1702 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1703 This has been repaired.
1704
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001705- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1706
1707- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1708
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001709- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1710 over a sequence.
1711
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001712- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001713 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001714
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001715- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1716
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001717- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1718 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1719 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1720 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1721 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1722 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1723 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1724 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1725
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001726- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1727 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1728 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1729
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001730- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1731 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1732 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1733 freelist.
1734
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001735- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1736 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1737
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001738- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1739 number.
1740
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001741- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1742 a TypeError exception.
1743
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001744- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1745 820195.
1746
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001747- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1748 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1749 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1750
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001751- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001752 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1753 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001754
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001755- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1756 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1757 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1758
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001759- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1760 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001761 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001762
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001763- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001764 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1765 the first call.
1766
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001767
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001768Extension modules
1769-----------------
1770
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001771- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1772 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1773
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001774- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1775 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1776 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1777 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1778 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1779 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1780 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001781
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001782- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1783
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001784- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1785
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001786- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1787 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1788
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001789- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1790 fewer false positives.
1791
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001792- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1793 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1794
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001795- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001796 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1797
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001798- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001799 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001800 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001801 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1802 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001803
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001804- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1805 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1806 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1807 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1808
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001809- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1810 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1811 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1812 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1813 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1814 #897625.
1815
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001816- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1817 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1818
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001819- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1820 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1821 and pops on either side of the deque.
1822
1823- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1824 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1825
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001826- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1827 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1828 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1829 other functions that expect a function argument.
1830
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001831- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1832
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001833- os.getsid was added.
1834
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001835- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1836 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1837 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1838
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001839- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1840
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001841- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1842
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001843- readline.clear_history was added.
1844
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001845- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1846
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001847- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1848
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001849- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1850
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001851- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1852
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001853- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1854
1855- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1856
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001857- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1858
1859- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1860
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001861- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1862 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1863 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1864
1865- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1866 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1867 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1868 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1869 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1870 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1871 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1872
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001873- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1874 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1875 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1876 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001877
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001878- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001879 iterators from a single iterable.
1880
1881- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1882 of raising a TypeError exception.
1883
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001884- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1885 as parameter.
1886
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001887Library
1888-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001889
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001890- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1891
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001892- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1893 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1894 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001895
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001896- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1897 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1898 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001899
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001900- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001901
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001902- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1903 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001904
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001905- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1906 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1907
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001908- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1909
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001910- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001911 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001912
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001913- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001914 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001915
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001916- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1917
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001918- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1919 on cygwin and mingw32.
1920
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001921- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1922
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001923- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1924 module.
1925
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001926- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1927 installation scheme for all platforms.
1928
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001929- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001930 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001931
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001932- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1933 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1934 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1935
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001936- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1937 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1938 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1939
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001940- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1941
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001942- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1943
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001944- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1945 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1946
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001947- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1948 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1949 type pattern with the same value exists.
1950
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001951- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1952 when run from the command prompt).
1953
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001954- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1955 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1956
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001957- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1958 default sort).
1959
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001960- Added global runctx function to profile module
1961
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001962- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1963
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001964- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1965
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001966- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1967
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001968- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001969 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1970 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1971 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1972 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1973 accordingly.
1974
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001975- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1976 decoding standards.
1977
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001978- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1979 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1980 called for all requests.
1981
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001982- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1983 they are passed to the compiler.
1984
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001985- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1986 indent, width and depth.
1987
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001988- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1989 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1990
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001991- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1992 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1993
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001994- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1995
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001996- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1997
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001998- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1999
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002000- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2001 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2002
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002003- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002004 for better performance.
2005
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002006- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002007
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002008- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2009 a string).
2010
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002011- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2012
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002013- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2014
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002015- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2016
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002017- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2018
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002019- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2020 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2021 list of fieldnames.
2022
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002023- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2024 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2025
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002026- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2027
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002028- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2029 empty lists.
2030
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002031- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2032 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2033 and shelves.
2034
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002035- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2036 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2037
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002038- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002039 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2040 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002041
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002042- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2043 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002044 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002045
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002046- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002047 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2048 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2049
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002050- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2051 and removed in Py2.4.
2052
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002053- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2054
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002055- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2056
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002057Tools/Demos
2058-----------
2059
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002060- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2061 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2062
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002063- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2064
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002065- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2066 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2067 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2068 destination in situations where both files are given.
2069
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002070- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2071 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2072 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2073 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2074
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002075- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2076
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002077- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2078 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2079 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2080 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2081 now.
2082
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002083- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2084 in effect
2085
2086- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2087 C-c C-h
2088
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002089- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2090 -d option was given.
2091
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002092Build
2093-----
2094
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002095- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2096 build under OS X.
2097
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002098- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2099 --enable-profiling.
2100
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002101- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2102 is configured --with-tsc.
2103
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002104- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2105 on AMD64.
2106
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002107- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2108 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2109
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002110- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2111 removed.
2112
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002113- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2114 supported (see PEP 11).
2115
2116- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2117
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002118- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2119
2120- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2121 (see PEP 11).
2122
2123- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2124 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2125
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002126C API
2127-----
2128
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002129- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2130 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2131 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2132
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002133- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2134 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2135 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2136 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2137
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002138- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2139 generator objects.
2140
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002141- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2142 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002143 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2144 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002145
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002146- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2147 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2148
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002149- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2150 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2151 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2152 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2153 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2154
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002155- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2156 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2157 about 10% faster.
2158
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002159- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2160 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2161
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002162- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2163 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2164 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2165 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2166
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002167Windows
2168-------
2169
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002170- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2171 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2172 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2173 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2174
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002175- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2176 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2177 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2178
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002179
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002180What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2181===============================
2182
2183*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2184
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002185IDLE
2186----
2187
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002188- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2189 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2190 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2191 context-menu actions.
2192
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002193- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2194 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2195 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2196 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2197 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2198 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2199 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2200 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2201 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2202
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002203
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002204What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2205=============================================
2206
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002207*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002208
2209Core and builtins
2210-----------------
2211
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002212- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002213 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002214 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2215
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002216Extension modules
2217-----------------
2218
2219- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2220 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2221 than once. This has been fixed.
2222
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002223- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2224 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2225 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2226 call.
2227
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002228- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2229
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002230Library
2231-------
2232
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002233- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2234 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2235
2236- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2237 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2238 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2239 restored.
2240
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002241IDLE
2242----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002243
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002244- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002245
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002246Build
2247-----
2248
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002249- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2250 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2251
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002252C API
2253-----
2254
2255Windows
2256-------
2257
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002258- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2259 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2260
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002261- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2262
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002263Mac
2264---
2265
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002266- Various fixes to pimp.
2267
2268- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2269
2270- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2271 more problems than it solves.
2272
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002273
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002274What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2275=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002276
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002277*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2278
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002279Core and builtins
2280-----------------
2281
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002282- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2283 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2284
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002285- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2286 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002287 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002288
2289- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2290 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2291 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002292 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002293
2294- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2295 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002296
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002297- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2298 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2299 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2300
2301- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002302 770247.
2303
2304- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002305
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002306Extension modules
2307-----------------
2308
2309- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2310 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2311
2312- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2313
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002314- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2315
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002316- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2317 contained within the _strptime module.
2318
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002319- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2320 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2321
2322- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002323 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2324
2325- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2326 the find_class attribute, if present.
2327
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002328- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002329
2330 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2331 (SF bug 763298).
2332
2333 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002334 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2335 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2336 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002337
2338 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2339
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002340Library
2341-------
2342
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002343- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2344
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002345- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2346 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2347 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2348 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2349 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2350 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2351 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2352 or Tester().
2353
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002354- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2355 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2356 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2357 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2358 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2359 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2360 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2361 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2362 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002363
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002364 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002365
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002366- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2367 weren't before was an oversight.
2368
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002369- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2370 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2371
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002372- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2373 when there are no lines.
2374
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002375- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2376 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2377
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002378- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2379 to child processes.
2380
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002381- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2382
2383- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2384
2385- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2386 xmlrpclib.
2387
2388- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2389 responses.
2390
2391- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2392 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2393
2394- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2395 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2396 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2397
2398- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2399 used as patterns.
2400
2401- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2402 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2403 than Tk 8.3.
2404
2405- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2406
2407- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002408
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002409Tools/Demos
2410-----------
2411
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002412- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2413
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002414- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2415
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002416- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002417
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002418Build
2419-----
2420
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002421- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2422
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002423- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2424
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002425- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2426 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002427
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002428- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2429 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2430 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002431
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002432C API
2433-----
2434
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002435- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2436 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2437
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002438Windows
2439-------
2440
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002441- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2442 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2443 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2444 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2445 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2446 Python exception ::
2447
2448 thread.error: can't start new thread
2449
2450 is raised now.
2451
2452- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2453 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2454 instead of from DLL teardown.
2455
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002456Mac
2457---
2458
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002459- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002460 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002461 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2462 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2463 the executable in the bundle.
2464
2465- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002466
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002467- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2468
2469- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2470 on Panther.
2471
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002472What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2473================================
2474
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002475*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002476
2477Core and builtins
2478-----------------
2479
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002480- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2481 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2482 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2483 with the -i option.
2484
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002485- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2486 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2487
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002488- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2489 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2490
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002491- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2492 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2493 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2494 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2495 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2496 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2497 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2498 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2499 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2500 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2501 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2502 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2503 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002504
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002505- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2506 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2507 embedded in a lambda expression.
2508
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002509- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2510 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2511 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2512 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2513 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2514
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002515- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2516 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2517 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2518
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002519- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2520 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2521
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002522- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2523 It's writable again.
2524
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002525- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2526 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2527 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002528 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002529
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002530- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2531 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2532 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2533
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002534Extension modules
2535-----------------
2536
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002537- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2538 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2539
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002540- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2541 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2542 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2543 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2544
2545- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2546 collection.
2547
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002548- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2549 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2550 unique within a single program run.
2551
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002552- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2553 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2554
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002555- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2556 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2557
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002558- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2559 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002560
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002561- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2562
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002563- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2564 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2565
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002566- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2567 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2568 for many BSD-derived systems.
2569
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002570
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002571Library
2572-------
2573
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002574- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2575 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2576 primary ones:
2577
2578 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2579 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2580 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2581
2582 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2583 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2584 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2585 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2586 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2587 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2588
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002589- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2590 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2591 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2592 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2593 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2594 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2595 argument.
2596
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002597- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2598 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2599 in the archive.
2600
2601- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2602 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2603
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002604- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2605 569574).
2606
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002607- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2608 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2609 no more.
2610
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002611- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2612 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2613 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2614 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2615 code coverage.
2616
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002617- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2618 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2619 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002620 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2621 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002622
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002623- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2624 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2625 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002626 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002627
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002628- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2629
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002630- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2631 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2632 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2633 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2634
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002635- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2636 handling.
2637
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002638- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2639 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2640
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002641- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2642 in socket.py.
2643
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002644- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2645
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002646- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2647 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2648 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2649 opener with proxy support.
2650
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002651- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2652
2653- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2654
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002655Tools/Demos
2656-----------
2657
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002658- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2659
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002660- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2661
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002662- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2663 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002664
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002665- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2666 files.
2667
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002668Build
2669-----
2670
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002671- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002672 different root directory.
2673
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002674C API
2675-----
2676
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002677- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2678 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2679 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2680 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2681 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2682 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2683 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2684 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2685 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2686 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2687
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002688- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2689 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2690 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2691 from Python.
2692
2693
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002694New platforms
2695-------------
2696
2697None this time.
2698
2699Tests
2700-----
2701
2702- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2703 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2704
2705Windows
2706-------
2707
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002708- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2709
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002710- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2711 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2712 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2713 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2714 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2715 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2716 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2717 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2718 that's what it's for.
2719
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002720Mac
2721---
2722
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002723- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2724 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2725 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2726 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002727- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2728 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2729- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002730
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002731SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2732------------------------------------
2733
2734430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2735598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2736622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2737661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2738683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2739697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2740713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2741724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2742727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2743729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2744730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2745731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2746732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2747733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2748735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2749740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2750744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2751745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2752747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2753749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2754751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2755753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2756755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2757757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2758760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2759
2760
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002761What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2762================================
2763
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002764*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002765
2766Core and builtins
2767-----------------
2768
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002769- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2770 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2771
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002772- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2773 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2774 and cannot be strings).
2775
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002776- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2777 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2778 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2779 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2780
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002781- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2782 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2783 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2784 Python itself.
2785
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002786- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2787 the referenced object, if it has one.
2788
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002789- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2790 the thread started at
2791 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2792
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002793- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2794 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2795 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2796 placed on a list index.
2797
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002798- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2799 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2800 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2801 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2802
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002803- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2804 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2805 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2806 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2807 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2808 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2809 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2810
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002811- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2812 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2813 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2814 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2815 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2816
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002817- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2818 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002819
2820- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2821 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2822 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2823 #693195.)
2824
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002825- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2826 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002827
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002828- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002829 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002830 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2831 interpreter executions, would fail.
2832
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002833- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002834 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002835 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002836
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002837Extension modules
2838-----------------
2839
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002840- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2841 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2842 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2843 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2844
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002845- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2846 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2847
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002848- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2849 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2850 and Greg Chapman.)
2851
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002852- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2853 recursively.
2854
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002855- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002856 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2857 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2858 leaks.
2859
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002860- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2861
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002862- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2863 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2864 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2865 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2866 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2867 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2868 #705836.
2869
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002870- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002871 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2872
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002873- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2874 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2875 See SF bug #692416.
2876
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002877- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2878 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2879
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002880- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2881 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2882 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002883
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002884- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002885 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2886 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2887
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002888- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2889 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2890 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2891 timeouts to work properly.
2892
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002893Library
2894-------
2895
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002896- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2897 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2898 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2899 future release.
2900
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002901- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2902 for querying platform dependent features.
2903
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002904- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002905
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002906- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2907 pickle protocol versions.
2908
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002909- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2910 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2911 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2912
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002913- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2914
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002915- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2916 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2917 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2918 modules.
2919
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002920- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2921 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2922 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2923
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002924- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2925 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2926
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002927- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2928 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2929 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2930
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002931- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002932 MS Office extensions.
2933
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002934- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2935 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2936
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002937- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2938 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2939
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002940- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2941 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2942 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2943 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2944 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2945 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2946
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002947- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2948 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2949 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002950
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002951- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2952 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2953 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2954
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002955- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2956
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002957- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2958 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2959 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2960
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002961Tools/Demos
2962-----------
2963
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002964- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2965 See the module docstring for details.
2966
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002967Build
2968-----
2969
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002970- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2971 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002972
2973C API
2974-----
2975
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002976- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2977
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002978- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2979 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2980 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2981
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002982- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2983 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002984
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002985 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2986 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2987 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002988
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002989- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002990 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2991
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002992- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2993 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2994 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002995
2996New platforms
2997-------------
2998
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002999None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003000
3001Tests
3002-----
3003
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003004- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3005 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003006
3007Windows
3008-------
3009
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003010- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3011 function.
3012
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003013- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3014 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003015
3016Mac
3017---
3018
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003019- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3020 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003021
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003022- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3023 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003024
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003025- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3026 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3027 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003028
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003029- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003030 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3031 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003032
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003033- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3034 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003035
3036
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003037What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3038=================================
3039
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003040*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003041
3042Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003043-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003044
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003045- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3046 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3047 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3048
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003049- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3050 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3051 (SF patch #664376.)
3052
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003053- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3054 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3055 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3056 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3057 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3058 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003059 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003060
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003061- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3062 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3063 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3064 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003065 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003066
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003067- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3068 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3069 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3070 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3071 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3072 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3073 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3074 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3075 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3076 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3077 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3078
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003079- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3080 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3081 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3082 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3083 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3084 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3085
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003086- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3087 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3088
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003089- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3090 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3091 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3092 case.)
3093
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003094- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3095 passed as unicode strings.
3096
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003097- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3098 See SF bug #683467.
3099
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003100- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3101 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3102
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003103- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3104
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003105- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3106
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003107- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3108 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3109 arguments.
3110
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003111- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3112 See SF bug #667147.
3113
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003114- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003115 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003116 See SF bug #676155.
3117
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003118- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003119 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003120 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3121 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3122 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3123 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3124 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3125 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003126
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003127Extension modules
3128-----------------
3129
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003130- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3131 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3132 tp_as_number pointer.
3133
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003134- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3135 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3136 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3137 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3138 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3139
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003140- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3141
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003142- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3143
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003144- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003145 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003146 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3147 patch #678531.)
3148
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003149- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3150 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3151
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003152- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3153 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3154
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003155- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3156
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003157- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3158 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3159 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3160
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003161- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3162
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003163- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3164 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3165
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003166- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003167
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003168- datetime changes:
3169
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003170 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3171
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003172 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3173 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3174 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3175 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3176 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3177 now.
3178
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003179 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003180 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3181 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003182
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003183 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003184 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003185 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3186 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3187 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3188 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003189
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003190 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3191 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3192 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003193 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3194
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003195 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3196 by a later example coded by Guido.
3197
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003198 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003199 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3200 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3201 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003202 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3203 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3204
3205 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3206 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3207 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3208 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3209 tzinfo subclass instance.
3210
3211 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3212 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3213 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3214 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3215 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3216 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3217 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3218 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003219
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003220 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3221 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3222 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3223 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3224 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003225 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3226
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003227 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003228
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003229 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3230 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3231 as a naive datetime object.
3232
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003233 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3234 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3235 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3236
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003237 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3238 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3239 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3240 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3241 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3242 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3243 comparison.
3244
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003245 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3246 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3247 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3248 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003249 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003250
3251 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003252
3253 and ::
3254
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003255 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3256
3257 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3258 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3259 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3260 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3261
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003262 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3263 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3264 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3265 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3266 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3267
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003268 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3269 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003270 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3271 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003272
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003273Library
3274-------
3275
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003276- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3277 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3278
3279- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3280 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3281 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3282 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3283 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3284 See PEP 307 for details.
3285
3286- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3287 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3288
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003289- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3290 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003291 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003292 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3293 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003294 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003295
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003296- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3297 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3298
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003299- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3300 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3301 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3302
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003303- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3304
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003305- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3306 exception.
3307
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003308- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3309 class.
3310
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003311- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3312 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3313 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3314
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003315- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3316 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3317
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003318- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003319 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3320 See SF bug #659228.
3321
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003322- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3323 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3324 See SF patch #651082.
3325
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003326- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003327
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003328- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3329 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3330
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003331- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003332 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003333
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003334- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3335 DOS paths from other platforms.
3336
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003337Tools/Demos
3338-----------
3339
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003340- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3341 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3342 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3343 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3344 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3345 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3346 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3347 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3348 example:
3349
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003350 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3351 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003352
3353 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3354
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003355
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003356Build
3357-----
3358
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003359- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3360 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3361 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003362 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3363
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003364 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3365
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003366- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3367 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3368 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3369 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3370 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3371 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3372 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3373 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3374 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3375
3376- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3377 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3378 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3379 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3380
3381- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3382 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3383
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003384C API
3385-----
3386
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003387- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3388 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003389
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003390- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3391 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3392 tp_as_number pointer.
3393
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003394- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3395 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3396 (SF #681367)
3397
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003398- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3399 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3400 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3401 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003402
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003403Tests
3404-----
3405
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003406- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003407 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3408 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3409 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3410 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3411 pydoc.)
3412
3413- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3414
3415- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003416
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003417Windows
3418-------
3419
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003420- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3421 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3422 time).
3423
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003424- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3425 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3426
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003427- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3428 release without strong cryptography.
3429
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003430- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003431 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003432
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003433- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3434 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3435
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003436Mac
3437---
3438
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003439- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3440 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003441
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003442- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3443 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3444 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003445
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003446- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3447 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003448
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003449- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3450 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3451 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3452 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003453
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003454- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003455 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3456 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3457 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003458
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003459
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003460What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003461=================================
3462
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003463*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003464
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003465Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003466--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003467
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003468- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3469
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003470- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3471 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003472 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003473 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003474 a different meaning than before.
3475
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003476- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003477 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003478 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003479
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003480- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003481 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003482 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003483
3484- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3485 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3486 and deallocation.
3487
3488- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3489 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3490
3491- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3492 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3493 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3494 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3495 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3496
3497- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3498 now detected by the garbage collector.
3499
3500- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3501 [SF bug 519621]
3502
3503- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3504 identifier.
3505
3506- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3507 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3508 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3509 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3510 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3511 [SF bug 563060]
3512
3513- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3514 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3515 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3516 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3517 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3518
3519- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3520 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3521 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3522
3523- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3524
3525- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3526 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3527 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3528 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3529 state of the slots would be lost.)
3530
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003531Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003532-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003533
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003534- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003535 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3536 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3537 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3538 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003539 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3540 Jython 2.1.
3541
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003542- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003543 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003544 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3545 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3546 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3547 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3548 these, see PEP 302.
3549
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003550- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3551 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3552 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3553
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003554- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3555 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3556 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3557
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003558- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3559 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3560 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3561
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003562- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3563 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3564 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3565 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3566 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3567 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3568 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3569 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3570 releases or implementations.
3571
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003572- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003573 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3574 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003575
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003576- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3577 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3578
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003579- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3580 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3581 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3582
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003583- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3584 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3585
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003586- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3587 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003588 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3589 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003590
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003591- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3592 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3593 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3594 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3595 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3596
3597 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3598 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3599 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3600 pattern.
3601
3602 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3603 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3604 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3605 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3606
3607 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3608 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3609 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3610 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3611 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3612 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3613
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003614- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3615 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3616 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3617 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3618 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3619 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3620 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3621 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003622
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003623- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3624 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3625 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3626 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3627 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003628 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3629 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3630 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3631 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3632 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3633 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3634 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003635
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003636- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3637 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3638
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003639- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3640 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3641 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3642 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3643 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3644 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3645 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3646 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3647 to Zack Weinberg!
3648
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003649- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3650 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3651 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3652 type. This has been fixed now.
3653
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003654- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3655 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3656 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3657
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003658- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3659 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3660 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3661 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3662 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3663 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3664 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3665 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003666 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003667
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003668- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3669 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3670 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003671
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003672- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3673 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3674 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3675 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3676 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3677 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3678 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3679 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003680 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003681 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3682 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3683
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003684- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3685 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3686 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3687 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3688 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3689 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3690 this.)
3691
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003692- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3693 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003694 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003695 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003696 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3697 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003698 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3699 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003700
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003701- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3702 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3703 currently running.
3704
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003705- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3706 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3707 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3708 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3709
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003710- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3711 as directory names.
3712
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003713- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3714 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3715
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003716- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3717 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3718
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003719- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003720 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3721 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003722
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003723- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3724 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3725 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3726 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3727 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3728
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003729- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3730 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3731 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3732 removed.
3733
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003734- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3735 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3736 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3737
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003738- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3739 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3740 to __debug__.
3741
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003742- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3743 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3744 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3745
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003746- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3747 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3748 deprecated now.
3749
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003750- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3751 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3752 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003753
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003754- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3755 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3756 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3757 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3758 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003759
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003760- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3761 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3762
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003763- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3764 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3765 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003766 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003767 is backward compatible.
3768
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003769- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3770 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3771 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3772 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3773 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3774
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003775- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3776 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3777 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3778 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3779 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3780 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003781
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003782- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3783 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3784
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003785- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3786 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3787
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003788- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3789 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3790 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3791 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3792 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3793
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003794- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3795 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3796 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3797
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003798- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003799 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3800
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003801- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3802 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3803 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003804
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003805- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3806 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3807
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003808- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3809 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3810 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3811
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003812- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3813
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003814Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003815-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003816
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003817- Added three operators to the operator module:
3818 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3819 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3820 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3821
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003822- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3823
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003824- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3825 archives.
3826
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003827- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3828 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3829 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3830
3831 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3832
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003833- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3834 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3835 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003836 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003837
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003838- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3839 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3840 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3841 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003842 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3843 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3844 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3845 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003846
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003847- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3848 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003849
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003850- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3851
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003852- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3853 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3854
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003855- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3856 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3857 supported.
3858
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003859- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3860
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003861- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3862 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003863
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003864- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3865 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3866
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003867- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3868
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003869- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3870 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3871
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003872- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3873 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3874 functions but callable type objects.
3875
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003876- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003877 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003878 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003879
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003880- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3881 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003882
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003883- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3884 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003885
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003886- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3887 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3888 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3889 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3890
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003891- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3892 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003893
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003894- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3895 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3896 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3897 and __imul__.
3898
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003899- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003900 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3901 is called.
3902
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003903- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3904 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3905 interpreter was compiled.
3906
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003907- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3908 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3909 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003910 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003911 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3912 1, not 2.
3913
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003914- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3915 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3916 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3917 limit.
3918
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003919- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3920 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3921 bug #623464.
3922
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003923- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3924 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3925 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3926 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3927
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003928Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003929-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003930
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003931- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3932
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003933- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3934 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3935 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3936 with Python 2.3a2.
3937
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003938- os.path exposes getctime.
3939
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003940- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003941 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003942 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003943 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003944 unit tests of floating point results.
3945
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003946- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3947 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3948 has been increased.
3949
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003950- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3951 executed.
3952
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003953- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3954 postinstallation script.
3955
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003956- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3957 test the current module.
3958
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003959- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003960 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3961 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3962 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3963 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3964
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003965- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003966 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003967 Ward's Optik package.
3968
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003969- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3970 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3971 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3972 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3973
3974- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3975 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003976 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003977
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003978- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3979 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3980 shelf are binary pickles.
3981
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003982- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3983 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3984
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003985- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3986 modules are iterators now.
3987
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003988- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3989 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3990 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3991 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3992 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3993 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003994
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003995- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3996 with their entity value.
3997
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003998- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3999
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004000- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4001 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004002
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004003- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4004 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004005 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004006
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004007- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4008 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4009 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4010 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4011 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4012 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4013 main():
4014
4015 import locale
4016 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4017
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004018- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4019 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4020
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004021- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4022 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4023 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4024 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4025 to the new standard.
4026
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004027- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4028 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4029 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4030 an extension to the database.
4031
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004032- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4033 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4034 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4035 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004036 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004037
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004038- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004039 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004040
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004041- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4042 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4043 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4044 bounded integers.
4045
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004046- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4047 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4048 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4049 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4050 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4051 in existence.
4052
4053 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4054 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4055 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4056 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4057 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4058 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4059
4060 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4061 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4062 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4063 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4064
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004065- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4066 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4067 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4068
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004069- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4070
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004071- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4072 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4073 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4074 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4075
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004076- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4077 argument.
4078
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004079- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4080 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4081 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4082 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4083 [SF patch 560794].
4084
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004085- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4086 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4087 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004088 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4089 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4090 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004091
4092- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4093 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004094
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004095- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4096 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4097 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4098 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004099
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004100- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4101 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4102 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4103 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4104 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4105
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004106- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004107
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004108- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4109
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004110- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4111 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4112 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4113 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4114 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4115 identical to None.
4116
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004117- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4118 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4119 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4120 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4121 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4122 results now.
4123
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004124- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4125 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4126
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004127- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4128 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4129 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4130 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4131 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4132 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4133 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4134 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4135
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004136- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4137
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004138- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4139 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4140
4141- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4142 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4143 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4144 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4145 and other systems.
4146
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004147- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4148 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4149 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4150 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 +00004151 work well with these.
4152
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004153- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4154
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004155- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004156 connections.
4157
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004158- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4159 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4160 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4161
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004162- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4163 sets
4164
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004165- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4166 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4167 name.
4168
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004169- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4170 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4171 passed in.
4172
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004173- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004174 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004175 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4176 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004177
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004178- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4179
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004180- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4181
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004182- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4183 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4184 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4185
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004186- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4187 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4188 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4189 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004190 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004191
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004192- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004193 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004194 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004195
4196- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4197 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4198 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4199
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004200- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004201 the value of its expression argument.
4202
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004203- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4204 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4205 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4206
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004207- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4208 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4209 skipstone browser was included.
4210
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004211- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4212 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4213
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004214Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004215-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004216
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004217- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4218 names in addition to accepting file names.
4219
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004220- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4221 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4222 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4223 still used and useful.)
4224
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004225- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4226 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4227 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4228 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004229
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004230- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4231 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4232 the generated binary.
4233
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004234Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004235-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004236
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004237- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4238
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004239- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4240 except in the hands of experts.
4241
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004242- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004243 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4244 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4245 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004246
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004247- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4248 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4249 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4250 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4251 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4252 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4253 builds.
4254
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004255- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4256 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4257 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4258 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4259 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4260 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4261 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4262 new type.
4263
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004264- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004265
4266 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4267 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4268 positive infinities.
4269
4270 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4271 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4272 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4273 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4274 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4275 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4276 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4277
4278 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4279
4280 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4281
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004282- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4283 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4284 size of the executable.
4285
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004286- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4287 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4288 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4289 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004290
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004291- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4292
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004293- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4294 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4295 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004296
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004297- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4298 well as Unix.
4299
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004300- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4301 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4302 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4303 modules in the README file for details.
4304
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004305C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004306-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004307
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004308- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4309 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004310 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004311 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004312 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004313
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004314- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4315 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4316 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4317 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4318 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4319 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004320 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004321 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4322 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4323 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4324 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4325 aligned.)
4326
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004327- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4328 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4329 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4330
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004331- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4332 level.
4333
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004334- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4335 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4336 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4337 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4338 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4339
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004340- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4341 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4342 code.
4343
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004344- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4345 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4346 adjusting for negative indices.
4347
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004348- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4349 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4350 object.
4351
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004352- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4353 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4354 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4355
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004356- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4357 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004358
4359- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4360
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004361- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4362 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4363 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4364 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4365
4366- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4367
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004368- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004369
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004370- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004371 without going through the buffer API.
4372
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004373- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004374
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004375- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4376 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4377 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4378 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4379
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004380- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4381 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4382
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004383- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004384 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4385
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004386New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004387-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004388
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004389- OpenVMS is now supported.
4390
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004391- AtheOS is now supported.
4392
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004393- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4394
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004395- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4396
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004397Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004398-----
4399
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004400- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4401 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4402 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004403
4404Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004405-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004406
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004407- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4408 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4409 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4410 bugs.
4411 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004412 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004413 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4414 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004415 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004416
4417- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004418 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004419
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004420- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4421 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4422
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004423- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4424 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004425 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004426 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4427
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004428- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4429 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4430 use files" uninstall option).
4431
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004432- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4433
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004434- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4435 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4436
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004437- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4438 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4439 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4440
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004441- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4442 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4443 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4444 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4445 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004446 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4447 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4448 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004449
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004450- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004451 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004452 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4453 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4454 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4455 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4456 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4457 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4458 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4459 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4460 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4461 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4462 work around.
4463
4464- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4465 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4466 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4467 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4468 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4469 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4470 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4471 specified with O_CREAT too).
4472
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004473Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004474----
4475
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004476- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004477
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004478- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4479 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4480 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4481
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004482- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4483 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4484 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4485
4486- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4487 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4488 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4489 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4490 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4491 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4492 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4493 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004494
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004495- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4496 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4497 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004498
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004499- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4500 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4501 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4502 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4503 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004504
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004505- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4506 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4507 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004508
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004509- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4510 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004511
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004512- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4513 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4514 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4515 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4516 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004517
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004518- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4519 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4520 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4521
4522- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4523 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4524 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004525
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004526- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4527 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4528 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4529 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004530 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004531
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004532- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4533 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004534
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004535- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4536 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004537
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004538- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004539 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004540 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4541 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004542
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004543
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004544What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004545===============================
4546
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004547*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4548
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004549Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004550--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004551
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004552- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4553 with a custom metaclass.
4554
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004555Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004556-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004557
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004558- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4559 are proxies.
4560
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004561Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004562-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004563
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004564- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4565 very short strings.
4566
4567- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4568 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4569 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4570 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4571 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4572
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004573Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004574-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004575
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004576- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4577 close or delete time).
4578
4579- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4580 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4581
4582- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4583
4584- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004585 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004586
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004587Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004588-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004589
4590Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004591-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004592
4593C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004594-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004595
4596New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004597-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004598
4599Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004600-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004601
4602Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004603-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004604
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004605- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4606
4607- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4608 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4609
4610- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4611 deleted at process exit time.
4612
4613- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4614 in backslash.
4615
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004616Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004617----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004618
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004619- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4620 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4621 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4622
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004623
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004624What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004625===========================
4626
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004627*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4628
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004629Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004630--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004631
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004632- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4633 been extensively updated. See
4634
4635 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4636
4637 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4638
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004639- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4640 deleted!
4641
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004642- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4643 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4644 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4645 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4646 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4647
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004648- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4649
4650 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4651 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4652
4653 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4654 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4655 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4656 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4657 supported anyway.
4658
4659 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4660 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4661
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004662- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4663 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4664 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4665 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4666 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004667
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004668- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4669 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4670 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4671
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004672Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004673-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004674
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004675- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4676 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4677 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4678 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4679 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4680 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004681 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4682 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4683 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4684 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004685
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004686- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4687 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4688 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4689
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004690Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004691-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004692
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004693- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4694
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004695Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004696-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004697
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004698- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4699 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4700 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4701 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4702 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4703 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4704
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004705- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4706
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004707- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4708
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004709- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4710
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004711- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4712 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4713 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4714
4715- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4716
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004717Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004718-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004719
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004720- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4721 off a search on Google.
4722
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004723Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004724-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004725
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004726- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4727 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4728 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4729 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4730 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4731 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4732 other platforms should do likewise.
4733
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004734- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4735 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4736 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4737
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004738C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004739-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004740
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004741- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4742 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4743 producing key-value pairs.
4744
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004745- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004746 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004747 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4748 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4749 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4750 previously went unchallenged.
4751
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004752New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004753-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004754
4755Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004756-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004757
4758Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004759-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004760
4761Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004762----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004763
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004764- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4765 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004766
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004767- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4768 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4769 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4770 home.
4771
4772
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004773What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004774===========================
4775
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004776*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4777
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004778Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004779--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004780
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004781- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4782 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004783
4784 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004785 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004786
4787 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4788 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004789 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004790 This needs to be documented.
4791
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004792- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4793 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4794
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004795- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4796 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4797 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4798
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004799- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4800 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4801
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004802- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4803 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4804 class forbids it).
4805
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004806- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4807 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4808 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4809
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004810- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4811
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004812Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004813-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004814
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004815- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4816 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004817 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004818
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004819- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4820 (like 1 + '').
4821
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004822Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004823-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004824
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004825- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4826 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4827 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4828 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004829 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004830 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4831
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004832- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4833 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4834 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4835 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4836
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004837- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4838 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004839 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4840 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4841 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004842
4843- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4844 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004845
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004846- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4847 bytes on its input.
4848
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004849Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004850-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004851
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004852- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004853 convenience function.
4854
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004855- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4856 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4857 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004858 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4859 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4860 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4861 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4862 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4863 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004864
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004865- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4866 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4867 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4868 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4869
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004870- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4871 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4872 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4873
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004874- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4875 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4876 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4877 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4878
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004879- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4880 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004881 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004882 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4883 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4884 new -l and -e options.
4885
4886- statcache is now deprecated.
4887
4888- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4889 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004890 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004891 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4892 time properly taken into account.
4893
4894- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4895 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4896 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4897 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4898
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004899Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004900-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004901
4902Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004903-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004904
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004905- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4906 is built with libdb3 if available.
4907
4908- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4909
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004910C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004911-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004912
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004913- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4914 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4915 PySequence_Size().
4916
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004917- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4918
4919- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4920 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4921 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4922
4923- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4924 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4925
4926- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4927 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4928
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004929New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004930-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004931
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004932- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4933 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4934
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004935- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4936 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4937
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004938- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4939
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004940Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004941-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004942
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004943- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4944 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4945
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004946Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004947-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004948
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004949Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004950----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004951
4952- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4953 removed completely in the next release.
4954
4955- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4956 OSX.
4957
4958- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4959 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4960
4961- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4962
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004963
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004964What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004965===========================
4966
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004967*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4968
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004969Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004970--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004971
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004972- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004973 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004974 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004975 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4976 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004977 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4978 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004979 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4980 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004981
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004982- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4983 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4984
4985- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4986 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4987
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004988Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004989-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004990
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004991- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4992 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4993 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4994 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4995 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4996 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4997 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4998 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4999
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005000- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5001 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5002 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5003 example).
5004
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005005- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005006 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005007 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005008 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005009
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005010- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5011 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5012 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005013 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005014
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005015- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5016 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5017 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5018 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5019 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5020 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5021
5022 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5023
5024 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5025
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005026Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005027-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005028
5029- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5030
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005031- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5032
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005033- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5034 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005035
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005036- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5037 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5038 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5039 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5040 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5041 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005042 attributes.
5043
5044- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5045 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5046 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005047
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005048- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5049 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5050 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005051
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005052- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5053 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5054 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005055 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5056 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5057
5058- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5059 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005060
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005061Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005062-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005063
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005064- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5065 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5066
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005067- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5068 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5069 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5070 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5071
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005072- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5073 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5074 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5075 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5076
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005077 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5078 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5079 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5080 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5081 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5082 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5083 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5084 without losing information).
5085
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005086- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005087 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5088 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5089 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5090 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5091 module).
5092
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005093 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005094 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5095 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5096 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5097 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005098
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005099- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005100 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5101 encoding.
5102
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005103- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5104 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5105
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005106- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005107 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5108
5109- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5110 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5111 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5112 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5113
5114- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5115
5116- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5117 ON, and OFF.
5118
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005119- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5120 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5121
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005122Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005123-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005124
5125- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5126 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5127 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005128
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005129- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5130 been added: -X and -E.
5131
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005132Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005133-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005134
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005135- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5136 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5137
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005138C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005139-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005140
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005141- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5142 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5143 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5144 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5145 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5146
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005147- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5148 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5149 as long) arguments.
5150
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005151- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5152 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5153 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5154 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5155 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5156 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5157
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005158- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5159 input.
5160
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005161New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005162-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005163
5164Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005165-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005166
5167Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005168-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005169
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005170- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5171 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5172 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5173
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005174- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5175 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5176 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005177 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005178
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005179 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5180 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5181 import signal
5182 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005183
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005184 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005185 while 1:
5186 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005187 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005188 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5189 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5190 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5191 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005192
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005193
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005194What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5195===========================
5196
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005197*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5198
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005199Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005200--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005201
5202- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5203 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5204 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5205
5206- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5207 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5208 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5209 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5210 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5211 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5212 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005213
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005214- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005215 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005216 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5217 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5218 associate a docstring with a property.
5219
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005220- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5221 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5222 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5223 other built-in object types.
5224
5225- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5226 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5227 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5228 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5229 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5230
5231- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5232 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5233
5234- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5235 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005236 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005237 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5238 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5239 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5240 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5241 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5242
5243- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5244 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5245 class.
5246
5247- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5248 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5249 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5250 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5251
5252- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5253 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5254 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5255 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5256
5257- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5258 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5259
5260- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5261 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5262 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5263 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5264 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005265 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005266 with the same value as s.
5267
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005268- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5269
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005270Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005271----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005272
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005273- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5274
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005275- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5276 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5277 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5278 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5279 objects.
5280
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005281- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5282 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005283 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5284 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5285
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005286- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5287 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5288 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5289
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005290Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005291-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005292
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005293- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5294 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5295 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5296 by the instances.
5297
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005298- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5299 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5300 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5301
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005302- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5303 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5304 before the entire comparison is complete.
5305
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005306- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5307 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5308 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5309
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005310- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5311 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5312 getwriter().
5313
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005314- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5315 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5316
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005317- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005318 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5319 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5320
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005321- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5322 iterable object.
5323
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005324- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5325 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005326
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005327- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5328 authentication.
5329
5330- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5331 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005332
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005333- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005334 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5335 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5336 a sample driver.)
5337
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005338Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005339-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005340
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005341- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5342 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5343 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5344 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5345 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5346 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5347 kernel has large file support.
5348
5349- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5350 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5351 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5352 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5353 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5354
5355- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5356 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5357 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5358
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005359C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005360-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005361
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005362- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5363 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5364
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005365New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005366-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005367
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005368- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5369 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5370
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005371Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005372-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005373
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005374- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5375 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5376 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5377 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5378 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5379
5380- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5381 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5382 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5383 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5384
5385- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5386 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5387
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005388Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005389-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005390
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005391- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005392 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5393 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005394
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005395
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005396What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5397===========================
5398
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005399*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5400
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005401Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005402----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005403
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005404- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5405 big to represent as a C double.
5406
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005407- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5408 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5409 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5410 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5411 restriction).
5412
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005413- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5414 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5415 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5416 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5417 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5418
5419 >>> dir([])
5420 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5421 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5422 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5423 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5424 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5425 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5426 'reverse', 'sort']
5427
5428 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5429
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005430- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005431 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5432 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5433 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5434 OverflowError exception.
5435
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005436- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005437 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005438 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5439 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5440 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5441 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5442 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005443 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005444 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5445 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5446
5447 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5448 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5449 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5450 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005451
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005452- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005453 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5454 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5455 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5456 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5457 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5458 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5459 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5460 once it is created.
5461
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005462- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5463 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5464 (key, value) pairs.
5465
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005466- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005467 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5468 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5469
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005470- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5471 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5472 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5473 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5474 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005475
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005476- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005477 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5478 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5479
5480 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5481
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005482- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005483 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5484
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005485Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005486-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005487
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005488- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005489 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5490 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005491
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005492- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5493 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5494 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5495 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5496 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5497 in this area anymore).
5498
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005499- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5500 threading.Timer.
5501
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005502- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5503 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5504
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005505- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005506 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5507
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005508- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005509 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5510 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5511 converted to Python longs.
5512
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005513- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005514 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5515
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005516- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5517 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5518 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5519
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005520Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005521-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005522
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005523- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5524 division operators as per PEP 238.
5525
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005526Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005527-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005528
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005529- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5530 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5531 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5532 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5533
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005534C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005535-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005536
5537- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005538
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005539- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5540 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005541 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005542
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005543 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5544 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005545 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005546 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005547
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005548- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005549 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5550 module:
5551
5552 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005553
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005554 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5555 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005556
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005557 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5558 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005559
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005560 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5561
5562 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5563
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005564- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005565 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5566 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5567 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005568
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005569New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005570-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005571
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005572- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5573 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5574 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5575 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5576 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005577
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005578Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005579-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005580
5581Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005582-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005583
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005584- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5585 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5586 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5587 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005588 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5589 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5590 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5591 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5592 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005593
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005594- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005595 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5596
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005597
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005598What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5599===========================
5600
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005601*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5602
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005603Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005604-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005605
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005606- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5607 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5608
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005609- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5610 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5611 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005612
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005613- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5614 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5615 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5616 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005617
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005618- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5619
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005620- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005621
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005622Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005623-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005624
5625- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005626 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005627 the module docstring for details.
5628
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005629Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005630-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005631
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005632- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005633 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5634 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5635 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005636
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005637- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5638 Nick Mathewson.
5639
5640Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005641----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005642
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005643- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5644 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5645 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5646 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5647 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5648 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5649 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5650 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5651
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005652- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5653 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5654 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5655 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5656
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005657- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5658 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5659 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5660 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5661 come a long way).
5662
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005663- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5664 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5665 write filters for these warnings).
5666
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005667- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5668 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5669 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5670 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5671 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5672
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005673- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5674 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5675 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5676 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5677 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5678 older distribution.
5679
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005680Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005681-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005682
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005683- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5684 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005685 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005686
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005687- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5688 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5689 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5690
5691- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5692
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005693- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5694
5695- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5696
5697- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5698
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005699- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005700
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005701- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5702
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005703New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005704-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005705
5706C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005707-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005708
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005709- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5710 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5711 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5712 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5713 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5714 against buffer overruns.
5715
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005716- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005717 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5718 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005719 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5720 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5721 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5722
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005723- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5724 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5725 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5726 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5727 deprecated.
5728
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005729Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005730-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005731
5732- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5733 relevant is found.
5734
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005735
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005736What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005737===========================
5738
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005739*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5740
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005741Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005742----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005743
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005744- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5745 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5746 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5747 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5748 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5749 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5750 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5751 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005752 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005753 repaired.
5754
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005755- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005756 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005757 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5758 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5759 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5760 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5761 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5762 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5763 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5764 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5765
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005766- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5767 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5768 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5769 leading BMO character).
5770
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005771- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5772 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5773 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5774
5775 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5776 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5777 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005778
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005779 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5780 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5781 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5782 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5783 for various simple to use conversions.
5784
5785 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5786 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5787
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005788 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5789 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5790 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5791 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5792 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5793 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5794 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5795 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5796 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5797 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5798 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5799 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5800 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5801 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5802 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005803
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005804- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5805 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5806 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005807 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005808 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005809
5810 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005811 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5812 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5813 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5814 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5815 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005816 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5817 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005818
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005819 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5820 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5821 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005822 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005823
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005824- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5825 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5826 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5827 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5828 floating arithmetic,
5829
5830 x = 9007199254740992.0
5831 print long(x)
5832
5833 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5834 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5835 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5836 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5837 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5838 functions are of good quality).
5839
5840 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5841 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5842 algorithms to break.
5843
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005844- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5845 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5846 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5847 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5848 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5849 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5850 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5851 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5852 order.
5853
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005854- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5855 operation along the most common code paths.
5856
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005857- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5858 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5859
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005860- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5861 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5862 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5863 {}.update(UserDict())
5864
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005865- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5866 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5867 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5868 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5869 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5870 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5871 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5872 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5873
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005874- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005875 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005876
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005877 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005878 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5879 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005880 join() method of strings
5881 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005882 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5883 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005884 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005885 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005886
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005887- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5888 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5889
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005890- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5891 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5892
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005893- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5894 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5895 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5896 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5897
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005898- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5899 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005900 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005901 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5902 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005903
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005904- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5905
5906
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005907Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005908-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005909
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005910- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005911 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005912 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5913 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5914
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005915- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5916 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5917
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005918- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5919 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5920 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5921 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5922
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005923- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5924 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5925 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5926
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005927- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5928
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005929- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5930
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005931- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5932 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5933 that are still imported into string.py).
5934
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005935- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5936
5937- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5938 Now it does.
5939
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005940- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5941
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005942- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5943 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5944 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5945 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5946 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005947 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5948 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005949
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005950- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5951 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5952 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5953 'help(object)'.
5954
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005955Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005956-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005957
5958- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005959 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005960 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5961 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5962
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005963- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005964 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5965 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005966
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005967C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005968-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005969
5970- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5971 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005972
5973----
5974
5975**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**