blob: f1551b12d895ec8ed7615573336a4c0e4864c163 [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
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000015- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
16 disabled caused a crash.
17
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000018- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
19 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
20
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000021- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
22 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
23
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000024- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
25
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000026- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000027 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
28 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
29 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000030
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000031- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
32
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000033- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
34 returning None.
35
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000036- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
37 ('\') with a specific error message.
38
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000039- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
40
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000041- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
42 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
43
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000044- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000045 an ferror() call.
46
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000047- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
48 list.sort().
49
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000050- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
51 (2+3) --> (5).
52
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000053- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
54
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000055- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
56 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000057
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000058- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
59 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
60 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
61
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000062Extension Modules
63-----------------
64
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000065- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
66 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
67
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +000068- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
69
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +000070- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
71 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
72 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
73
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +000074- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
75
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +000076- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
77 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
78
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +000079- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
80 file size.
81
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +000082- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
83
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +000084- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
85 {remove_history,replace_history}
86
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000087- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
88 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000089
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000090- stat_float_times is now True.
91
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000092- array.array objects are now picklable.
93
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000094- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
95 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
96
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000097- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
98 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
99 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
100
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000101- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
102 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000103
104Library
105-------
106
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000107- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
108 files to PyPI.
109
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000110- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
111 them to PyPI.
112
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000113- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
114 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
115 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
116 work as expected.
117
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000118- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
119 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
120
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000121- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
122 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
123
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000124- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
125
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000126- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
127 to build.
128
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000129- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
130 symbolic links on Windows.
131
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000132- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
133 profile.py if available.
134
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000135- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
136
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000137- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
138 in LWPCookieJar.
139
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000140- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
141
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000142- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
143
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000144- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
145
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000146- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
147
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000148- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
149
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000150- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
151
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000152- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
153
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000154- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
155
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000156- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
157 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
158 be exploited in various ways.
159
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000160- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
161
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000162- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
163
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000164- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
165
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000166- Enhancements to the csv module:
167
168 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
169 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
170 PEP 305.
171 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
172 reporting.
173 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
174 dictates.
175 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000176 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000177 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000178 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
179 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000180 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
181 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000182 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000183 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
184 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
185 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
186 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
187 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
188 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
189 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
190 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
191 without first creating a dialect class.
192 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
193 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
194 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000195 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000196 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
197 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000198 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
199 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
200 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
201 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000202 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
203 This has been fixed.
204
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000205- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
206 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
207 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
208 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
209
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000210- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
211
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000212- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
213 (Bug #951915).
214
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000215- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
216 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
217 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
218 encoding alias table
219
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000220- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
221
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000222- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
223 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
224
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000225- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
226
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000227- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
228
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000229- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
230
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000231- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
232
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000233- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
234
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000235- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
236 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
237 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
238
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000239- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000240 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000241
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000242- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
243 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
244 tokenizer with very long source lines.
245
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000246- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
247 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
248
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000249- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
250 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000251
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000252- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
253 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
254
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000255- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
256 correctly.
257
258
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000259Build
260-----
261
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000262- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
263 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
264 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
265
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000266- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
267
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000268- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
269 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
270
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000271- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
272 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
273 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
274 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
275 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
276 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
277 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
278 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
279
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000280- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
281 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
282 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
283 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
284
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000285
286C API
287-----
288
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000289- Removed PyRange_New().
290
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000291
292Tests
293-----
294
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000295- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000296
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000297
298Documentation
299-------------
300
301- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
302 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
303 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
304
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000305Mac
306---
307
308
309
310Tools/Demos
311-----------
312
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000313- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000314
315
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000316What's New in Python 2.4 final?
317===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000318
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000319*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000320
321Core and builtins
322-----------------
323
324- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
325 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
326 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
327
328
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000329What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
330==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000331
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000332*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000333
334Core and builtins
335-----------------
336
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000337- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
338 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
339 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
340
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000341
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000342Library
343-------
344
345- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
346 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
347 raised is re-raised.
348
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000349- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
350 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
351
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000352- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
353 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
354 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
355 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
356 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
357 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
358 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
359 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
360 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
361 by the slice are recomputed now.
362
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000363- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000364
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000365Build
366-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000367
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000368- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
369 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
370 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000371
372C API
373-----
374
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000375- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
376
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000377
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000378What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
379================================
380
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000381*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000382
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000383License
384-------
385
386The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
387is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
388changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
389Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
390intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
391durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
392the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
393License::
394
395 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
396
397says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
398to Python 2.1.1.
399
400The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
401License Version 2.
402
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000403Core and builtins
404-----------------
405
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000406- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
407 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
408 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
409 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
410 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
411 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
412 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
413 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
414 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
415 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
416
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000417- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000418
419Extension Modules
420-----------------
421
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000422- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
423 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
424 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
425 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000426
427Library
428-------
429
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000430- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
431 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
432 returned.
433
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000434- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
435
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000436- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
437 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
438
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000439- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
440
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000441- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
442 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000443
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000444- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
445
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000446- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
447
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000448- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000449 the source code is updated and reloaded.
450
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000451Build
452-----
453
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000454- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000455
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000456What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
457================================
458
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000459*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000460
461Core and builtins
462-----------------
463
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000464- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000465 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
466
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000467- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
468 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
469 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
470 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
471
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000472- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
473 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
474
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000475- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
476 constant.
477
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000478- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
479 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
480 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
481 large), and to anomalies such as
482 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
483 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
484 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
485 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000486
487Extension modules
488-----------------
489
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000490- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
491 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000492 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
493 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
494 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000495
496Library
497-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000498
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000499- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000500 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000501 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
502 --swig-cpp.
503
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000504- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
505 it is set.
506
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000507- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000508
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000509- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
510 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
511 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
512 Closes bug #1039270.
513
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000514- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000515
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000516 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000517 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
518 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
519 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
520 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
521 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
522 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
523 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
524 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
525 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
526 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
527 + Updates to documentation.
528
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000529- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
530 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
531 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
532 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
533
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000534- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000535
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000536- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
537 applications should use the getmember function.
538
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000539- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
540
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000541- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
542 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
543 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
544 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
545 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
546 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
547 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
548 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
549 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
550
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000551- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
552 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000553 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000554
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000555- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
556 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
557 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
558 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
559 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
560 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
561 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
562 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000563
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000564- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
565 the new public features (of which there are many).
566
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000567- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000568 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
569 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
570 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
571 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000572 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000573
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000574- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
575
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000576- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
577 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
578 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
579 options.
580
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000581- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
582 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
583 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
584 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
585 conditions under which non-string values work.
586
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000587Build
588-----
589
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000590- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
591 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
592 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
593
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000594- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
595 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
596 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
597 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
598 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000599
600C API
601-----
602
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000603- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
604 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
605
606- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
607
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000608- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
609 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
610 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
611 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
612 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
613 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
614 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
615 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
616 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
617
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000618- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
619
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000620- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
621 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
622 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000623
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000624Tests
625-----
626
627- test__locale ported to unittest
628
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000629Mac
630---
631
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000632- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
633 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
634 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000635
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000636Tools/Demos
637-----------
638
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000639- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
640 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
641 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
642 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
643 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000644
645
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000646What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
647=================================
648
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000649*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000650
651Core and builtins
652-----------------
653
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000654- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000655 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
656
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000657- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
658 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
659 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
660 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
661 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
662 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
663 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
664 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000665 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
666 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
667 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
668 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
669 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000670
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000671- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
672 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
673 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
674 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
675 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
676
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000677- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
678
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000679- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
680 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
681
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000682- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
683 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
684 modified the list.
685
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000686- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
687 functions is now writable.
688
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000689- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
690 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
691 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
692 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
693
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000694- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
695 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
696 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
697 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
698 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000699
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000700- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
701 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
702
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000703Extension modules
704-----------------
705
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000706- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
707
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000708- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
709 data.
710
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000711- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
712 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
713 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
714 supposed to have been truncated away.
715
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000716- Added socket.socketpair().
717
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000718- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
719 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
720
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000721- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000722 versions of Python, have now been removed.
723
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000724Library
725-------
726
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000727- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000728 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000729
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000730- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
731 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
732
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000733- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
734 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
735
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000736- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
737
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000738- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
739 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000740
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000741- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
742 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
743
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000744- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
745
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000746- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
747
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000748- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
749
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000750- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
751 Percivall.
752
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000753- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
754 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
755
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000756- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
757 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
758 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000759 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000760
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000761- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
762 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
763 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
764 and exponent.
765
766- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
767
768- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
769 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
770 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
771
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000772- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
773 to the readline module.
774
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000775- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000776 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
777 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000778
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000779- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
780 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
781 contains symlinks.
782
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000783- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
784 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
785
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000786- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
787 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
788 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
789
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000790- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
791 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
792 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
793 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
794 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
795 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
796 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
797 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
798 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
799 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
800 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
801 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
802 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
803
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000804- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
805
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000806Tools/Demos
807-----------
808
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000809- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
810 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
811
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000812- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
813
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000814Build
815-----
816
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000817- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
818 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
819 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
820 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
821 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
822 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
823 plans to do so.
824
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000825- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
826 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
827
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000828- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
829 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
830
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000831- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
832 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
833
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000834- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
835 GNU/k*BSD systems.
836
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000837- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
838 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
839
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000840C API
841-----
842
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000843..
844
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000845Documentation
846-------------
847
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000848- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
849 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
850
851- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
852 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
853 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000854
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000855New platforms
856-------------
857
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000858- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
859
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000860Tests
861-----
862
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000863..
864
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000865Windows
866-------
867
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000868- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
869 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
870 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
871 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
872 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
873 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
874 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
875 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
876 the problem.
877
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000878Mac
879---
880
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000881..
882
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000883
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000884What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
885=================================
886
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000887*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000888
889Core and builtins
890-----------------
891
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000892- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
893 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
894 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
895 sensitive code.
896
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000897- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000898 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000899
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000900 @staticmethod
901 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000902
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000903 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000904
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000905- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
906 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
907 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
908 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
909 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
910 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
911 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
912 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
913 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
914 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
915 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
916
917 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
918 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
919 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
920 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
921 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
922 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
923 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
924
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000925- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
926 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
927
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000928- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000929 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000930
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000931- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000932 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000933 which was missing for no apparent reason.
934
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000935- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000936 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
937 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
938
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000939- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
940 types that support garbage collection.
941
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000942- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
943
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000944- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
945 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
946 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
947 Jython.
948
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000949- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
950
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000951- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
952 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
953
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000954- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
955 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
956 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000957
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000958- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
959 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
960 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
961
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000962Extension modules
963-----------------
964
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000965- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
966
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000967Library
968-------
969
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000970- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
971 TIS-620
972
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000973- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
974 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
975 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
976 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
977 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
978 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
979 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
980 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
981 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
982 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
983
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000984- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
985
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000986- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
987 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
988 same as when the argument is omitted).
989 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
990
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000991- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
992
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000993- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
994 schemes are offered.
995
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000996- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
997
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000998- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
999 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1000 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1001
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001002- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1003
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001004- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1005 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1006
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001007- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1008 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1009 when dummy_threading is being used.
1010
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001011- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1012 from a tarfile.
1013
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001014- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001015 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001016
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001017- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1018 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1019 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1020 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1021
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001022- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1023 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1024
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001025- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1026 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1027 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1028 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1029 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1030 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1031 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1032 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1033 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1034 by some other method in progress).
1035
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001036- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1037 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1038 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001039
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001040- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1041
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001042- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1043 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1044 AM Kuchling.
1045
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001046- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1047 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1048 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1049
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001050- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1051 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1052 instead of unsigned.
1053
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001054- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001055 no longer part of the public API.
1056
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001057- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1058 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1059 string methods of the same name).
1060
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001061- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001062 SF patch 945642.
1063
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001064- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1065
1066 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1067
1068 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1069 DocTestSuites.
1070
1071- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1072 that provide thread-local data.
1073
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001074- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1075 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1076
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001077- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1078
1079- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1080 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1081 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1082
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001083- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1084
1085 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1086 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1087 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001088
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001089 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1090 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1091 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1092 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1093
1094 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1095 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1096
1097 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1098 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1099 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1100 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1101
1102 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1103 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1104 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1105 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1106 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1107
1108 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1109 wrapping help output.
1110
1111 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1112 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1113 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001114
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001115C API
1116-----
1117
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001118- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1119 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1120 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1121 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1122 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1123 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1124 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1125 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1126 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1127 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1128 its visible semantics have not changed.
1129
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001130- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1131 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1132
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001133Documentation
1134-------------
1135
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001136- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001137
1138 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001139 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001140
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001141 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001142
1143 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1144
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001145- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001146
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001147Tests
1148-----
1149
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001150- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001151 platforms that use the Makefile.
1152
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001153- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1154 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1155 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1156
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001157
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001158What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1159=================================
1160
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001161*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001162
1163Core and builtins
1164-----------------
1165
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001166- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1167 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1168 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1169 objects now (one object instead of three).
1170
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001171- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1172 Windows DLLs.
1173
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001174- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1175 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001176
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001177- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1178 a new .pyc magic.
1179
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001180- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1181 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1182 be there.
1183
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001184- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1185 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1186 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1187
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001188- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1189 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1190 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1191
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001192- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1193
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001194- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1195 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1196 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001197
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001198- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1199 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1200
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001201- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1202
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001203- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001204 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001205
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001206- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1207
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001208- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1209
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001210- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1211 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1212
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001213- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1214 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1215 Fixes bug #858016 .
1216
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001217- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1218 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1219 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1220
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001221- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1222 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1223 improves their performance (about 35%).
1224
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001225- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1226 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1227 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1228
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001229- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1230 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1231 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1232 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1233
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001234- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1235 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001236 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001237 length is not known).
1238
1239- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1240 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001241 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1242 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001243 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1244
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001245- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1246 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1247
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001248- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1249 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1250 keyword arguments.
1251
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001252- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1253 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1254 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1255
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001256- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1257 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1258 cases.
1259
1260- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1261 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1262 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1263 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1264 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1265 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1266 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1267 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1268 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1269 a release build.
1270
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001271- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1272 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1273
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001274- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001275 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001276
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001277- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1278 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1279 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1280 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1281 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1282 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1283 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1284 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1285 destroyed.
1286
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001287- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1288 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1289 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1290 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1291 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1292 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1293 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1294 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1295
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001296- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1297 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1298 character other than a space.
1299
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001300- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1301 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1302 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1303 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1304 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1305 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1306 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1307 attributes with the same name.
1308
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001309- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1310 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1311 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1312 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1313 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1314 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1315 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1316 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1317 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1318 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1319 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1320 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1321 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1322 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001323
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001324- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1325 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1326 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1327 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1328 This has been repaired.
1329
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001330- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1331
1332- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1333
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001334- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1335 over a sequence.
1336
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001337- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001338 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001339
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001340- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1341
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001342- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1343 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1344 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1345 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1346 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1347 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1348 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1349 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1350
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001351- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1352 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1353 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1354
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001355- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1356 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1357 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1358 freelist.
1359
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001360- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1361 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1362
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001363- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1364 number.
1365
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001366- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1367 a TypeError exception.
1368
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001369- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1370 820195.
1371
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001372- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1373 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1374 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1375
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001376- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001377 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1378 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001379
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001380- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1381 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1382 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1383
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001384- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1385 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001386 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001387
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001388- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001389 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1390 the first call.
1391
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001392
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001393Extension modules
1394-----------------
1395
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001396- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1397 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1398
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001399- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1400 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1401 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1402 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1403 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1404 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1405 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001406
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001407- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1408
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001409- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1410
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001411- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1412 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1413
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001414- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1415 fewer false positives.
1416
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001417- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1418 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1419
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001420- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001421 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1422
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001423- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001424 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001425 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001426 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1427 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001428
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001429- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1430 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1431 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1432 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1433
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001434- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1435 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1436 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1437 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1438 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1439 #897625.
1440
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001441- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1442 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1443
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001444- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1445 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1446 and pops on either side of the deque.
1447
1448- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1449 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1450
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001451- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1452 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1453 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1454 other functions that expect a function argument.
1455
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001456- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1457
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001458- os.getsid was added.
1459
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001460- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1461 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1462 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1463
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001464- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1465
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001466- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1467
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001468- readline.clear_history was added.
1469
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001470- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1471
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001472- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1473
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001474- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1475
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001476- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1477
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001478- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1479
1480- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1481
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001482- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1483
1484- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1485
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001486- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1487 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1488 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1489
1490- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1491 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1492 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1493 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1494 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1495 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1496 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1497
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001498- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1499 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1500 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1501 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001502
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001503- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001504 iterators from a single iterable.
1505
1506- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1507 of raising a TypeError exception.
1508
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001509- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1510 as parameter.
1511
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001512Library
1513-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001514
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001515- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1516 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1517 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001518
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001519- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1520 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1521 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001522
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001523- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001524
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001525- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1526 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001527
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001528- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1529 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1530
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001531- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1532
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001533- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001534 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001535
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001536- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001537 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001538
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001539- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1540
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001541- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1542 on cygwin and mingw32.
1543
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001544- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1545
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001546- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1547 module.
1548
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001549- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1550 installation scheme for all platforms.
1551
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001552- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001553 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001554
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001555- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1556 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1557 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1558
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001559- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1560 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1561 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1562
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001563- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1564
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001565- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1566
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001567- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1568 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1569
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001570- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1571 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1572 type pattern with the same value exists.
1573
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001574- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1575 when run from the command prompt).
1576
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001577- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1578 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1579
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001580- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1581 default sort).
1582
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001583- Added global runctx function to profile module
1584
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001585- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1586
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001587- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1588
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001589- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1590
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001591- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001592 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1593 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1594 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1595 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1596 accordingly.
1597
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001598- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1599 decoding standards.
1600
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001601- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1602 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1603 called for all requests.
1604
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001605- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1606 they are passed to the compiler.
1607
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001608- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1609 indent, width and depth.
1610
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001611- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1612 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1613
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001614- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1615 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1616
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001617- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1618
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001619- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1620
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001621- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1622
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001623- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1624 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1625
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001626- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001627 for better performance.
1628
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001629- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001630
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001631- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1632 a string).
1633
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001634- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1635
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001636- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1637
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001638- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1639
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001640- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1641
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001642- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1643 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1644 list of fieldnames.
1645
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001646- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1647 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1648
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001649- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1650
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001651- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1652 empty lists.
1653
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001654- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1655 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1656 and shelves.
1657
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001658- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1659 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1660
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001661- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001662 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1663 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001664
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001665- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1666 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001667 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001668
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001669- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001670 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1671 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1672
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001673- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1674 and removed in Py2.4.
1675
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001676- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1677
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001678- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1679
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001680Tools/Demos
1681-----------
1682
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001683- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1684 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1685
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001686- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1687
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001688- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1689 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1690 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1691 destination in situations where both files are given.
1692
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001693- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1694 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1695 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1696 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1697
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001698- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1699
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001700- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1701 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1702 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1703 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1704 now.
1705
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001706- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1707 in effect
1708
1709- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1710 C-c C-h
1711
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001712- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1713 -d option was given.
1714
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001715Build
1716-----
1717
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001718- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1719 build under OS X.
1720
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001721- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1722 --enable-profiling.
1723
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001724- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1725 is configured --with-tsc.
1726
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001727- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1728 on AMD64.
1729
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001730- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1731 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1732
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001733- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1734 removed.
1735
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001736- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1737 supported (see PEP 11).
1738
1739- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1740
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001741- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1742
1743- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1744 (see PEP 11).
1745
1746- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1747 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1748
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001749C API
1750-----
1751
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001752- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1753 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1754 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1755
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001756- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1757 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1758 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1759 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1760
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001761- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1762 generator objects.
1763
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001764- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1765 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001766 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1767 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001768
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001769- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1770 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1771
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001772- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1773 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1774 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1775 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1776 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1777
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001778- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1779 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1780 about 10% faster.
1781
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001782- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1783 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1784
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001785- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1786 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1787 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1788 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1789
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001790Windows
1791-------
1792
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001793- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1794 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1795 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1796 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1797
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001798- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1799 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1800 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1801
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001802
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001803What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1804===============================
1805
1806*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1807
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001808IDLE
1809----
1810
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001811- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1812 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1813 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1814 context-menu actions.
1815
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001816- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1817 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1818 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1819 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1820 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1821 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1822 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1823 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1824 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1825
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001826
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001827What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1828=============================================
1829
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001830*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001831
1832Core and builtins
1833-----------------
1834
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001835- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001836 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001837 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1838
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001839Extension modules
1840-----------------
1841
1842- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1843 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1844 than once. This has been fixed.
1845
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001846- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1847 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1848 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1849 call.
1850
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001851- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1852
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001853Library
1854-------
1855
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001856- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1857 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1858
1859- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1860 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1861 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1862 restored.
1863
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001864IDLE
1865----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001866
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001867- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001868
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001869Build
1870-----
1871
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001872- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1873 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1874
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001875C API
1876-----
1877
1878Windows
1879-------
1880
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001881- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1882 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1883
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001884- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1885
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001886Mac
1887---
1888
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001889- Various fixes to pimp.
1890
1891- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1892
1893- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1894 more problems than it solves.
1895
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001896
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001897What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1898=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001899
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001900*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1901
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001902Core and builtins
1903-----------------
1904
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001905- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1906 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1907
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001908- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1909 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001910 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001911
1912- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1913 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1914 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001915 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001916
1917- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1918 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001919
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001920- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1921 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1922 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1923
1924- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001925 770247.
1926
1927- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001928
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001929Extension modules
1930-----------------
1931
1932- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1933 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1934
1935- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1936
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001937- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1938
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001939- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1940 contained within the _strptime module.
1941
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001942- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1943 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1944
1945- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001946 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1947
1948- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1949 the find_class attribute, if present.
1950
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001951- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001952
1953 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1954 (SF bug 763298).
1955
1956 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001957 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1958 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1959 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001960
1961 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1962
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001963Library
1964-------
1965
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001966- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1967
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001968- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1969 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1970 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1971 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1972 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1973 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1974 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1975 or Tester().
1976
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001977- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1978 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1979 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1980 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1981 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1982 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1983 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1984 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1985 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001986
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001987 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001988
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001989- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1990 weren't before was an oversight.
1991
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001992- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1993 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1994
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001995- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1996 when there are no lines.
1997
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001998- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1999 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2000
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002001- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2002 to child processes.
2003
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002004- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2005
2006- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2007
2008- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2009 xmlrpclib.
2010
2011- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2012 responses.
2013
2014- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2015 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2016
2017- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2018 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2019 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2020
2021- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2022 used as patterns.
2023
2024- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2025 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2026 than Tk 8.3.
2027
2028- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2029
2030- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002031
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002032Tools/Demos
2033-----------
2034
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002035- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2036
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002037- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2038
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002039- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002040
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002041Build
2042-----
2043
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002044- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2045
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002046- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2047
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002048- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2049 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002050
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002051- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2052 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2053 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002054
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002055C API
2056-----
2057
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002058- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2059 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2060
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002061Windows
2062-------
2063
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002064- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2065 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2066 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2067 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2068 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2069 Python exception ::
2070
2071 thread.error: can't start new thread
2072
2073 is raised now.
2074
2075- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2076 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2077 instead of from DLL teardown.
2078
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002079Mac
2080---
2081
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002082- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002083 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002084 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2085 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2086 the executable in the bundle.
2087
2088- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002089
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002090- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2091
2092- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2093 on Panther.
2094
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002095What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2096================================
2097
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002098*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002099
2100Core and builtins
2101-----------------
2102
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002103- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2104 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2105 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2106 with the -i option.
2107
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002108- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2109 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2110
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002111- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2112 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2113
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002114- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2115 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2116 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2117 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2118 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2119 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2120 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2121 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2122 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2123 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2124 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2125 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2126 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002127
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002128- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2129 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2130 embedded in a lambda expression.
2131
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002132- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2133 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2134 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2135 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2136 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2137
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002138- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2139 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2140 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2141
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002142- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2143 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2144
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002145- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2146 It's writable again.
2147
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002148- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2149 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2150 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002151 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002152
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002153- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2154 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2155 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2156
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002157Extension modules
2158-----------------
2159
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002160- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2161 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2162
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002163- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2164 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2165 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2166 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2167
2168- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2169 collection.
2170
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002171- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2172 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2173 unique within a single program run.
2174
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002175- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2176 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2177
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002178- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2179 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2180
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002181- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2182 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002183
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002184- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2185
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002186- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2187 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2188
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002189- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2190 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2191 for many BSD-derived systems.
2192
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002193
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002194Library
2195-------
2196
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002197- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2198 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2199 primary ones:
2200
2201 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2202 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2203 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2204
2205 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2206 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2207 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2208 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2209 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2210 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2211
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002212- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2213 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2214 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2215 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2216 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2217 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2218 argument.
2219
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002220- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2221 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2222 in the archive.
2223
2224- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2225 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2226
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002227- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2228 569574).
2229
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002230- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2231 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2232 no more.
2233
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002234- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2235 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2236 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2237 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2238 code coverage.
2239
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002240- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2241 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2242 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002243 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2244 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002245
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002246- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2247 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2248 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002249 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002250
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002251- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2252
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002253- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2254 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2255 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2256 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2257
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002258- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2259 handling.
2260
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002261- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2262 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2263
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002264- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2265 in socket.py.
2266
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002267- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2268
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002269- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2270 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2271 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2272 opener with proxy support.
2273
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002274- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2275
2276- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2277
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002278Tools/Demos
2279-----------
2280
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002281- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2282
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002283- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2284
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002285- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2286 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002287
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002288- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2289 files.
2290
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002291Build
2292-----
2293
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002294- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002295 different root directory.
2296
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002297C API
2298-----
2299
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002300- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2301 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2302 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2303 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2304 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2305 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2306 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2307 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2308 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2309 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2310
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002311- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2312 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2313 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2314 from Python.
2315
2316
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002317New platforms
2318-------------
2319
2320None this time.
2321
2322Tests
2323-----
2324
2325- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2326 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2327
2328Windows
2329-------
2330
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002331- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2332
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002333- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2334 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2335 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2336 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2337 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2338 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2339 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2340 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2341 that's what it's for.
2342
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002343Mac
2344---
2345
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002346- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2347 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2348 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2349 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002350- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2351 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2352- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002353
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002354SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2355------------------------------------
2356
2357430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2358598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2359622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2360661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2361683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2362697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2363713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2364724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2365727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2366729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2367730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2368731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2369732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2370733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2371735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2372740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2373744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2374745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2375747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2376749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2377751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2378753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2379755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2380757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2381760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2382
2383
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002384What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2385================================
2386
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002387*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002388
2389Core and builtins
2390-----------------
2391
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002392- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2393 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2394
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002395- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2396 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2397 and cannot be strings).
2398
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002399- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2400 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2401 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2402 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2403
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002404- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2405 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2406 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2407 Python itself.
2408
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002409- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2410 the referenced object, if it has one.
2411
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002412- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2413 the thread started at
2414 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2415
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002416- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2417 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2418 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2419 placed on a list index.
2420
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002421- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2422 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2423 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2424 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2425
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002426- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2427 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2428 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2429 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2430 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2431 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2432 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2433
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002434- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2435 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2436 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2437 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2438 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2439
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002440- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2441 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002442
2443- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2444 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2445 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2446 #693195.)
2447
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002448- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2449 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002450
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002451- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002452 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002453 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2454 interpreter executions, would fail.
2455
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002456- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002457 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002458 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002459
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002460Extension modules
2461-----------------
2462
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002463- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2464 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2465 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2466 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2467
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002468- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2469 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2470
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002471- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2472 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2473 and Greg Chapman.)
2474
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002475- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2476 recursively.
2477
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002478- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002479 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2480 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2481 leaks.
2482
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002483- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2484
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002485- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2486 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2487 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2488 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2489 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2490 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2491 #705836.
2492
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002493- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002494 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2495
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002496- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2497 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2498 See SF bug #692416.
2499
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002500- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2501 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2502
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002503- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2504 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2505 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002506
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002507- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002508 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2509 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2510
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002511- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2512 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2513 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2514 timeouts to work properly.
2515
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002516Library
2517-------
2518
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002519- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2520 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2521 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2522 future release.
2523
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002524- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2525 for querying platform dependent features.
2526
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002527- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002528
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002529- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2530 pickle protocol versions.
2531
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002532- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2533 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2534 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2535
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002536- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2537
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002538- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2539 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2540 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2541 modules.
2542
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002543- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2544 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2545 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2546
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002547- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2548 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2549
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002550- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2551 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2552 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2553
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002554- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002555 MS Office extensions.
2556
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002557- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2558 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2559
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002560- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2561 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2562
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002563- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2564 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2565 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2566 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2567 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2568 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2569
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002570- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2571 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2572 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002573
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002574- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2575 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2576 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2577
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002578- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2579
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002580- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2581 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2582 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2583
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002584Tools/Demos
2585-----------
2586
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002587- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2588 See the module docstring for details.
2589
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002590Build
2591-----
2592
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002593- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2594 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002595
2596C API
2597-----
2598
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002599- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2600
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002601- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2602 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2603 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2604
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002605- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2606 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002607
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002608 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2609 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2610 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002611
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002612- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002613 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2614
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002615- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2616 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2617 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002618
2619New platforms
2620-------------
2621
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002622None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002623
2624Tests
2625-----
2626
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002627- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2628 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002629
2630Windows
2631-------
2632
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002633- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2634 function.
2635
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002636- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2637 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002638
2639Mac
2640---
2641
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002642- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2643 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002644
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002645- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2646 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002647
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002648- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2649 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2650 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002651
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002652- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002653 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2654 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002655
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002656- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2657 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002658
2659
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002660What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2661=================================
2662
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002663*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002664
2665Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002666-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002667
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002668- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2669 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2670 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2671
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002672- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2673 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2674 (SF patch #664376.)
2675
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002676- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2677 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2678 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2679 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2680 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2681 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002682 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002683
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002684- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2685 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2686 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2687 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002688 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002689
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002690- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2691 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2692 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2693 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2694 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2695 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2696 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2697 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2698 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2699 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2700 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2701
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002702- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2703 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2704 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2705 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2706 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2707 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2708
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002709- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2710 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2711
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002712- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2713 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2714 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2715 case.)
2716
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002717- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2718 passed as unicode strings.
2719
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002720- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2721 See SF bug #683467.
2722
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002723- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2724 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2725
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002726- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2727
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002728- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2729
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002730- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2731 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2732 arguments.
2733
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002734- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2735 See SF bug #667147.
2736
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002737- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002738 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002739 See SF bug #676155.
2740
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002741- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002742 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002743 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2744 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2745 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2746 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2747 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2748 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002749
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002750Extension modules
2751-----------------
2752
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002753- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2754 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2755 tp_as_number pointer.
2756
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002757- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2758 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2759 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2760 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2761 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2762
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002763- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2764
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002765- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2766
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002767- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002768 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002769 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2770 patch #678531.)
2771
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002772- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2773 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2774
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002775- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2776 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2777
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002778- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2779
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002780- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2781 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2782 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2783
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002784- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2785
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002786- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2787 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2788
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002789- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002790
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002791- datetime changes:
2792
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002793 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2794
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002795 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2796 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2797 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2798 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2799 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2800 now.
2801
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002802 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002803 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2804 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002805
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002806 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002807 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002808 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2809 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2810 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2811 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002812
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002813 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2814 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2815 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002816 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2817
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002818 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2819 by a later example coded by Guido.
2820
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002821 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002822 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2823 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2824 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002825 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2826 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2827
2828 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2829 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2830 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2831 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2832 tzinfo subclass instance.
2833
2834 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2835 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2836 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2837 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2838 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2839 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2840 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2841 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002842
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002843 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2844 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2845 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2846 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2847 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002848 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2849
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002850 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002851
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002852 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2853 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2854 as a naive datetime object.
2855
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002856 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2857 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2858 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2859
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002860 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2861 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2862 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2863 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2864 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2865 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2866 comparison.
2867
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002868 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2869 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2870 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2871 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002872 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002873
2874 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002875
2876 and ::
2877
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002878 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2879
2880 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2881 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2882 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2883 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2884
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002885 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2886 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2887 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2888 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2889 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2890
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002891 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2892 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002893 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2894 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002895
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002896Library
2897-------
2898
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002899- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2900 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2901
2902- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2903 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2904 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2905 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2906 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2907 See PEP 307 for details.
2908
2909- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2910 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2911
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002912- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2913 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002914 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002915 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2916 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002917 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002918
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002919- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2920 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2921
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002922- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2923 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2924 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2925
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002926- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2927
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002928- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2929 exception.
2930
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002931- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2932 class.
2933
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002934- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2935 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2936 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2937
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002938- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2939 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2940
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002941- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002942 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2943 See SF bug #659228.
2944
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002945- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2946 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2947 See SF patch #651082.
2948
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002949- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002950
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002951- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2952 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2953
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002954- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002955 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002956
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002957- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2958 DOS paths from other platforms.
2959
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002960Tools/Demos
2961-----------
2962
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002963- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2964 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2965 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2966 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2967 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2968 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2969 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2970 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2971 example:
2972
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002973 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2974 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002975
2976 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2977
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002978
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002979Build
2980-----
2981
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002982- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2983 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2984 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002985 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2986
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002987 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2988
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002989- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2990 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2991 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2992 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2993 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2994 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2995 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2996 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2997 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2998
2999- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3000 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3001 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3002 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3003
3004- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3005 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3006
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003007C API
3008-----
3009
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003010- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3011 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003012
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003013- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3014 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3015 tp_as_number pointer.
3016
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003017- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3018 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3019 (SF #681367)
3020
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003021- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3022 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3023 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3024 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003025
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003026Tests
3027-----
3028
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003029- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003030 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3031 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3032 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3033 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3034 pydoc.)
3035
3036- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3037
3038- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003039
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003040Windows
3041-------
3042
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003043- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3044 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3045 time).
3046
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003047- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3048 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3049
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003050- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3051 release without strong cryptography.
3052
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003053- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003054 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003055
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003056- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3057 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3058
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003059Mac
3060---
3061
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003062- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3063 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003064
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003065- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3066 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3067 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003068
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003069- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3070 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003071
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003072- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3073 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3074 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3075 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003076
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003077- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003078 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3079 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3080 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003081
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003082
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003083What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003084=================================
3085
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003086*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003087
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003088Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003089--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003090
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003091- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3092
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003093- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3094 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003095 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003096 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003097 a different meaning than before.
3098
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003099- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003100 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003101 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003102
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003103- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003104 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003105 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003106
3107- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3108 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3109 and deallocation.
3110
3111- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3112 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3113
3114- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3115 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3116 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3117 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3118 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3119
3120- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3121 now detected by the garbage collector.
3122
3123- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3124 [SF bug 519621]
3125
3126- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3127 identifier.
3128
3129- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3130 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3131 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3132 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3133 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3134 [SF bug 563060]
3135
3136- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3137 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3138 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3139 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3140 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3141
3142- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3143 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3144 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3145
3146- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3147
3148- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3149 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3150 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3151 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3152 state of the slots would be lost.)
3153
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003154Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003155-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003156
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003157- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003158 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3159 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3160 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3161 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003162 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3163 Jython 2.1.
3164
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003165- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003166 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003167 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3168 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3169 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3170 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3171 these, see PEP 302.
3172
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003173- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3174 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3175 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3176
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003177- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3178 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3179 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3180
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003181- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3182 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3183 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3184
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003185- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3186 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3187 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3188 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3189 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3190 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3191 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3192 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3193 releases or implementations.
3194
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003195- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003196 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3197 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003198
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003199- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3200 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3201
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003202- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3203 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3204 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3205
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003206- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3207 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3208
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003209- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3210 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003211 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3212 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003213
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003214- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3215 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3216 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3217 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3218 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3219
3220 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3221 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3222 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3223 pattern.
3224
3225 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3226 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3227 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3228 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3229
3230 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3231 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3232 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3233 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3234 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3235 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3236
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003237- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3238 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3239 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3240 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3241 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3242 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3243 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3244 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003245
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003246- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3247 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3248 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3249 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3250 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003251 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3252 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3253 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3254 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3255 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3256 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3257 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003258
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003259- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3260 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3261
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003262- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3263 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3264 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3265 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3266 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3267 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3268 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3269 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3270 to Zack Weinberg!
3271
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003272- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3273 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3274 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3275 type. This has been fixed now.
3276
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003277- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3278 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3279 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3280
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003281- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3282 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3283 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3284 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3285 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3286 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3287 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3288 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003289 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003290
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003291- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3292 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3293 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003294
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003295- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3296 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3297 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3298 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3299 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3300 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3301 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3302 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003303 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003304 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3305 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3306
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003307- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3308 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3309 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3310 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3311 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3312 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3313 this.)
3314
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003315- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3316 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003317 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003318 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003319 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3320 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003321 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3322 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003323
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003324- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3325 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3326 currently running.
3327
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003328- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3329 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3330 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3331 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3332
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003333- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3334 as directory names.
3335
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003336- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3337 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3338
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003339- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3340 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3341
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003342- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003343 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3344 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003345
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003346- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3347 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3348 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3349 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3350 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3351
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003352- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3353 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3354 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3355 removed.
3356
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003357- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3358 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3359 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3360
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003361- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3362 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3363 to __debug__.
3364
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003365- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3366 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3367 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3368
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003369- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3370 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3371 deprecated now.
3372
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003373- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3374 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3375 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003376
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003377- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3378 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3379 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3380 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3381 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003382
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003383- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3384 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3385
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003386- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3387 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3388 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003389 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003390 is backward compatible.
3391
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003392- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3393 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3394 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3395 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3396 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3397
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003398- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3399 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3400 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3401 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3402 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3403 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003404
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003405- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3406 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3407
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003408- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3409 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3410
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003411- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3412 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3413 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3414 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3415 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3416
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003417- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3418 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3419 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3420
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003421- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003422 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3423
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003424- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3425 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3426 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003427
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003428- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3429 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3430
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003431- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3432 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3433 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3434
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003435- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3436
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003437Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003438-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003439
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003440- Added three operators to the operator module:
3441 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3442 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3443 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3444
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003445- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3446
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003447- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3448 archives.
3449
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003450- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3451 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3452 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3453
3454 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3455
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003456- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3457 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3458 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003459 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003460
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003461- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3462 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3463 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3464 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003465 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3466 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3467 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3468 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003469
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003470- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3471 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003472
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003473- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3474
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003475- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3476 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3477
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003478- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3479 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3480 supported.
3481
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003482- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3483
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003484- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3485 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003486
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003487- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3488 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3489
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003490- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3491
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003492- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3493 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3494
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003495- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3496 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3497 functions but callable type objects.
3498
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003499- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003500 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003501 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003502
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003503- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3504 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003505
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003506- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3507 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003508
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003509- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3510 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3511 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3512 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3513
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003514- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3515 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003516
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003517- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3518 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3519 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3520 and __imul__.
3521
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003522- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003523 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3524 is called.
3525
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003526- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3527 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3528 interpreter was compiled.
3529
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003530- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3531 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3532 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003533 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003534 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3535 1, not 2.
3536
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003537- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3538 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3539 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3540 limit.
3541
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003542- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3543 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3544 bug #623464.
3545
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003546- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3547 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3548 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3549 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3550
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003551Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003552-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003553
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003554- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3555
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003556- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3557 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3558 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3559 with Python 2.3a2.
3560
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003561- os.path exposes getctime.
3562
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003563- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003564 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003565 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003566 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003567 unit tests of floating point results.
3568
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003569- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3570 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3571 has been increased.
3572
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003573- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3574 executed.
3575
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003576- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3577 postinstallation script.
3578
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003579- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3580 test the current module.
3581
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003582- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003583 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3584 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3585 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3586 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3587
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003588- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003589 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003590 Ward's Optik package.
3591
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003592- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3593 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3594 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3595 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3596
3597- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3598 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003599 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003600
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003601- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3602 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3603 shelf are binary pickles.
3604
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003605- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3606 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3607
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003608- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3609 modules are iterators now.
3610
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003611- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3612 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3613 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3614 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3615 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3616 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003617
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003618- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3619 with their entity value.
3620
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003621- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3622
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003623- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3624 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003625
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003626- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3627 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003628 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003629
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003630- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3631 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3632 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3633 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3634 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3635 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3636 main():
3637
3638 import locale
3639 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3640
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003641- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3642 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3643
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003644- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3645 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3646 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3647 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3648 to the new standard.
3649
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003650- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3651 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3652 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3653 an extension to the database.
3654
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003655- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3656 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3657 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3658 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003659 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003660
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003661- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003662 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003663
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003664- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3665 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3666 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3667 bounded integers.
3668
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003669- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3670 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3671 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3672 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3673 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3674 in existence.
3675
3676 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3677 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3678 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3679 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3680 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3681 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3682
3683 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3684 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3685 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3686 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3687
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003688- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3689 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3690 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3691
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003692- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3693
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003694- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3695 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3696 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3697 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3698
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003699- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3700 argument.
3701
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003702- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3703 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3704 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3705 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3706 [SF patch 560794].
3707
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003708- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3709 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3710 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003711 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3712 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3713 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003714
3715- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3716 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003717
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003718- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3719 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3720 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3721 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003722
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003723- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3724 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3725 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3726 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3727 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3728
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003729- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003730
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003731- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3732
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003733- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3734 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3735 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3736 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3737 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3738 identical to None.
3739
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003740- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3741 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3742 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3743 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3744 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3745 results now.
3746
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003747- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3748 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3749
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003750- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3751 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3752 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3753 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3754 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3755 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3756 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3757 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3758
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003759- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3760
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003761- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3762 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3763
3764- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3765 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3766 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3767 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3768 and other systems.
3769
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003770- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3771 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3772 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3773 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 +00003774 work well with these.
3775
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003776- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3777
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003778- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003779 connections.
3780
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003781- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3782 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3783 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3784
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003785- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3786 sets
3787
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003788- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3789 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3790 name.
3791
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003792- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3793 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3794 passed in.
3795
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003796- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003797 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003798 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3799 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003800
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003801- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3802
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003803- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3804
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003805- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3806 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3807 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3808
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003809- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3810 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3811 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3812 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003813 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003814
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003815- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003816 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003817 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003818
3819- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3820 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3821 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3822
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003823- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003824 the value of its expression argument.
3825
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003826- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3827 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3828 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3829
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003830- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3831 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3832 skipstone browser was included.
3833
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003834- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3835 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3836
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003837Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003838-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003839
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003840- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3841 names in addition to accepting file names.
3842
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003843- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3844 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3845 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3846 still used and useful.)
3847
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003848- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3849 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3850 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3851 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003852
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003853- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3854 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3855 the generated binary.
3856
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003857Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003858-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003859
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003860- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3861
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003862- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3863 except in the hands of experts.
3864
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003865- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003866 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3867 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3868 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003869
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003870- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3871 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3872 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3873 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3874 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3875 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3876 builds.
3877
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003878- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3879 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3880 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3881 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3882 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3883 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3884 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3885 new type.
3886
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003887- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003888
3889 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3890 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3891 positive infinities.
3892
3893 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3894 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3895 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3896 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3897 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3898 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3899 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3900
3901 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3902
3903 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3904
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003905- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3906 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3907 size of the executable.
3908
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003909- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3910 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3911 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3912 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003913
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003914- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3915
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003916- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3917 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3918 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003919
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003920- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3921 well as Unix.
3922
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003923- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3924 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3925 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3926 modules in the README file for details.
3927
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003928C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003929-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003930
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003931- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3932 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003933 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003934 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003935 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003936
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003937- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3938 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3939 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3940 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3941 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3942 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003943 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003944 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3945 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3946 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3947 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3948 aligned.)
3949
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003950- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3951 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3952 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3953
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003954- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3955 level.
3956
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003957- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3958 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3959 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3960 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3961 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3962
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003963- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3964 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3965 code.
3966
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003967- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3968 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3969 adjusting for negative indices.
3970
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003971- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3972 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3973 object.
3974
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003975- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3976 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3977 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3978
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003979- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3980 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003981
3982- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3983
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003984- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3985 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3986 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3987 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3988
3989- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3990
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003991- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003992
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003993- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003994 without going through the buffer API.
3995
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003996- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003997
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003998- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3999 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4000 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4001 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4002
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004003- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4004 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4005
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004006- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004007 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4008
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004009New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004010-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004011
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004012- OpenVMS is now supported.
4013
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004014- AtheOS is now supported.
4015
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004016- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4017
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004018- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4019
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004020Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004021-----
4022
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004023- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4024 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4025 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004026
4027Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004028-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004029
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004030- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4031 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4032 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4033 bugs.
4034 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004035 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004036 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4037 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004038 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004039
4040- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004041 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004042
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004043- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4044 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4045
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004046- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4047 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004048 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004049 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4050
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004051- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4052 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4053 use files" uninstall option).
4054
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004055- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4056
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004057- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4058 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4059
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004060- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4061 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4062 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4063
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004064- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4065 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4066 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4067 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4068 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004069 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4070 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4071 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004072
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004073- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004074 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004075 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4076 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4077 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4078 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4079 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4080 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4081 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4082 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4083 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4084 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4085 work around.
4086
4087- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4088 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4089 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4090 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4091 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4092 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4093 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4094 specified with O_CREAT too).
4095
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004096Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004097----
4098
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004099- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004100
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004101- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4102 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4103 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4104
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004105- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4106 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4107 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4108
4109- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4110 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4111 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4112 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4113 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4114 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4115 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4116 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004117
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004118- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4119 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4120 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004121
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004122- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4123 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4124 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4125 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4126 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004127
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004128- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4129 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4130 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004131
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004132- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4133 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004134
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004135- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4136 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4137 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4138 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4139 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004140
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004141- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4142 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4143 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4144
4145- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4146 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4147 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004148
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004149- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4150 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4151 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4152 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004153 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004154
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004155- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4156 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004157
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004158- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4159 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004160
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004161- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004162 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004163 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4164 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004165
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004166
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004167What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004168===============================
4169
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004170*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4171
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004172Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004173--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004174
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004175- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4176 with a custom metaclass.
4177
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004178Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004179-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004180
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004181- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4182 are proxies.
4183
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004184Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004185-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004186
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004187- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4188 very short strings.
4189
4190- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4191 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4192 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4193 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4194 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4195
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004196Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004197-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004198
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004199- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4200 close or delete time).
4201
4202- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4203 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4204
4205- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4206
4207- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004208 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004209
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004210Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004211-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004212
4213Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004214-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004215
4216C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004217-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004218
4219New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004220-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004221
4222Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004223-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004224
4225Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004226-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004227
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004228- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4229
4230- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4231 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4232
4233- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4234 deleted at process exit time.
4235
4236- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4237 in backslash.
4238
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004239Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004240----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004241
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004242- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4243 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4244 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4245
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004246
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004247What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004248===========================
4249
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004250*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4251
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004252Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004253--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004254
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004255- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4256 been extensively updated. See
4257
4258 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4259
4260 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4261
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004262- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4263 deleted!
4264
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004265- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4266 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4267 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4268 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4269 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4270
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004271- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4272
4273 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4274 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4275
4276 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4277 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4278 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4279 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4280 supported anyway.
4281
4282 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4283 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4284
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004285- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4286 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4287 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4288 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4289 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004290
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004291- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4292 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4293 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4294
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004295Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004296-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004297
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004298- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4299 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4300 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4301 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4302 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4303 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004304 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4305 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4306 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4307 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004308
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004309- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4310 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4311 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4312
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004313Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004314-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004315
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004316- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4317
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004318Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004319-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004320
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004321- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4322 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4323 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4324 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4325 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4326 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4327
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004328- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4329
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004330- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4331
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004332- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4333
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004334- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4335 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4336 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4337
4338- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4339
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004340Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004341-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004342
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004343- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4344 off a search on Google.
4345
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004346Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004347-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004348
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004349- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4350 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4351 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4352 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4353 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4354 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4355 other platforms should do likewise.
4356
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004357- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4358 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4359 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4360
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004361C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004362-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004363
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004364- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4365 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4366 producing key-value pairs.
4367
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004368- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004369 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004370 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4371 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4372 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4373 previously went unchallenged.
4374
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004375New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004376-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004377
4378Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004379-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004380
4381Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004382-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004383
4384Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004385----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004386
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004387- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4388 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004389
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004390- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4391 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4392 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4393 home.
4394
4395
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004396What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004397===========================
4398
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004399*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4400
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004401Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004402--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004403
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004404- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4405 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004406
4407 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004408 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004409
4410 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4411 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004412 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004413 This needs to be documented.
4414
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004415- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4416 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4417
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004418- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4419 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4420 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4421
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004422- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4423 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4424
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004425- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4426 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4427 class forbids it).
4428
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004429- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4430 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4431 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4432
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004433- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4434
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004435Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004436-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004437
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004438- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4439 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004440 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004441
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004442- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4443 (like 1 + '').
4444
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004445Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004446-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004447
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004448- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4449 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4450 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4451 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004452 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004453 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4454
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004455- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4456 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4457 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4458 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4459
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004460- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4461 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004462 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4463 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4464 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004465
4466- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4467 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004468
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004469- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4470 bytes on its input.
4471
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004472Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004473-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004474
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004475- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004476 convenience function.
4477
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004478- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4479 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4480 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004481 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4482 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4483 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4484 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4485 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4486 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004487
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004488- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4489 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4490 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4491 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4492
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004493- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4494 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4495 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4496
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004497- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4498 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4499 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4500 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4501
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004502- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4503 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004504 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004505 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4506 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4507 new -l and -e options.
4508
4509- statcache is now deprecated.
4510
4511- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4512 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004513 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004514 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4515 time properly taken into account.
4516
4517- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4518 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4519 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4520 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4521
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004522Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004523-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004524
4525Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004526-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004527
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004528- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4529 is built with libdb3 if available.
4530
4531- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4532
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004533C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004534-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004535
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004536- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4537 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4538 PySequence_Size().
4539
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004540- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4541
4542- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4543 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4544 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4545
4546- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4547 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4548
4549- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4550 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4551
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004552New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004553-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004554
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004555- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4556 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4557
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004558- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4559 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4560
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004561- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4562
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004563Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004564-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004565
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004566- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4567 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4568
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004569Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004570-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004571
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004572Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004573----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004574
4575- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4576 removed completely in the next release.
4577
4578- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4579 OSX.
4580
4581- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4582 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4583
4584- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4585
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004586
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004587What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004588===========================
4589
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004590*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4591
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004592Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004593--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004594
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004595- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004596 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004597 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004598 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4599 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004600 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4601 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004602 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4603 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004604
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004605- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4606 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4607
4608- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4609 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4610
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004611Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004612-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004613
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004614- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4615 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4616 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4617 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4618 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4619 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4620 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4621 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4622
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004623- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4624 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4625 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4626 example).
4627
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004628- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004629 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004630 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004631 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004632
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004633- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4634 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4635 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004636 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004637
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004638- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4639 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4640 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4641 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4642 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4643 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4644
4645 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4646
4647 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4648
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004649Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004650-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004651
4652- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4653
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004654- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4655
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004656- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4657 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004658
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004659- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4660 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4661 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4662 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4663 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4664 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004665 attributes.
4666
4667- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4668 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4669 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004670
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004671- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4672 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4673 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004674
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004675- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4676 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4677 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004678 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4679 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4680
4681- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4682 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004683
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004684Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004685-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004686
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004687- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4688 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4689
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004690- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4691 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4692 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4693 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4694
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004695- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4696 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4697 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4698 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4699
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004700 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4701 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4702 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4703 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4704 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4705 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4706 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4707 without losing information).
4708
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004709- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004710 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4711 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4712 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4713 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4714 module).
4715
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004716 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004717 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4718 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4719 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4720 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004721
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004722- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004723 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4724 encoding.
4725
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004726- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4727 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4728
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004729- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004730 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4731
4732- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4733 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4734 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4735 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4736
4737- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4738
4739- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4740 ON, and OFF.
4741
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004742- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4743 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4744
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004745Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004746-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004747
4748- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4749 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4750 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004751
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004752- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4753 been added: -X and -E.
4754
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004755Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004756-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004757
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004758- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4759 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4760
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004761C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004762-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004763
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004764- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4765 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4766 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4767 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4768 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4769
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004770- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4771 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4772 as long) arguments.
4773
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004774- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4775 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4776 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4777 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4778 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4779 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4780
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004781- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4782 input.
4783
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004784New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004785-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004786
4787Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004788-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004789
4790Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004791-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004792
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004793- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4794 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4795 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4796
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004797- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4798 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4799 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004800 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004801
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004802 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4803 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4804 import signal
4805 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004806
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004807 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004808 while 1:
4809 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004810 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004811 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4812 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4813 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4814 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004815
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004816
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004817What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4818===========================
4819
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004820*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4821
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004822Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004823--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004824
4825- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4826 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4827 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4828
4829- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4830 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4831 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4832 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4833 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4834 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4835 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004836
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004837- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004838 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004839 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4840 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4841 associate a docstring with a property.
4842
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004843- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4844 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4845 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4846 other built-in object types.
4847
4848- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4849 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4850 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4851 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4852 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4853
4854- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4855 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4856
4857- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4858 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004859 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004860 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4861 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4862 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4863 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4864 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4865
4866- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4867 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4868 class.
4869
4870- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4871 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4872 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4873 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4874
4875- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4876 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4877 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4878 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4879
4880- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4881 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4882
4883- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4884 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4885 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4886 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4887 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004888 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004889 with the same value as s.
4890
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004891- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4892
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004893Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004894----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004895
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004896- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4897
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004898- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4899 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4900 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4901 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4902 objects.
4903
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004904- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4905 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004906 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4907 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4908
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004909- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4910 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4911 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4912
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004913Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004914-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004915
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004916- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4917 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4918 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4919 by the instances.
4920
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004921- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4922 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4923 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4924
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004925- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4926 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4927 before the entire comparison is complete.
4928
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004929- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4930 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4931 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4932
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004933- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4934 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4935 getwriter().
4936
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004937- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4938 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4939
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004940- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004941 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4942 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4943
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004944- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4945 iterable object.
4946
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004947- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4948 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004949
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004950- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4951 authentication.
4952
4953- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4954 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004955
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004956- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004957 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4958 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4959 a sample driver.)
4960
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004961Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004962-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004963
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004964- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4965 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4966 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4967 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4968 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4969 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4970 kernel has large file support.
4971
4972- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4973 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4974 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4975 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4976 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4977
4978- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4979 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4980 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4981
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004982C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004983-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004984
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004985- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4986 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4987
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004988New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004989-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004990
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004991- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4992 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4993
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004994Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004995-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004996
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004997- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4998 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4999 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5000 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5001 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5002
5003- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5004 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5005 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5006 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5007
5008- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5009 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5010
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005011Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005012-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005013
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005014- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005015 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5016 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005017
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005018
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005019What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5020===========================
5021
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005022*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5023
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005024Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005025----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005026
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005027- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5028 big to represent as a C double.
5029
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005030- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5031 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5032 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5033 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5034 restriction).
5035
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005036- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5037 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5038 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5039 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5040 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5041
5042 >>> dir([])
5043 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5044 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5045 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5046 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5047 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5048 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5049 'reverse', 'sort']
5050
5051 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5052
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005053- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005054 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5055 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5056 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5057 OverflowError exception.
5058
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005059- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005060 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005061 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5062 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5063 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5064 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5065 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005066 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005067 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5068 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5069
5070 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5071 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5072 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5073 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005074
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005075- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005076 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5077 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5078 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5079 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5080 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5081 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5082 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5083 once it is created.
5084
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005085- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5086 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5087 (key, value) pairs.
5088
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005089- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005090 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5091 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5092
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005093- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5094 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5095 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5096 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5097 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005098
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005099- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005100 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5101 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5102
5103 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5104
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005105- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005106 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5107
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005108Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005109-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005110
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005111- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005112 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5113 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005114
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005115- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5116 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5117 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5118 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5119 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5120 in this area anymore).
5121
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005122- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5123 threading.Timer.
5124
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005125- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5126 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5127
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005128- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005129 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5130
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005131- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005132 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5133 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5134 converted to Python longs.
5135
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005136- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005137 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5138
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005139- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5140 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5141 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5142
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005143Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005144-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005145
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005146- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5147 division operators as per PEP 238.
5148
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005149Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005150-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005151
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005152- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5153 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5154 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5155 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5156
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005157C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005158-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005159
5160- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005161
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005162- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5163 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005164 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005165
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005166 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5167 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005168 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005169 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005170
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005171- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005172 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5173 module:
5174
5175 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005176
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005177 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5178 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005179
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005180 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5181 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005182
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005183 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5184
5185 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5186
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005187- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005188 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5189 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5190 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005191
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005192New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005193-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005194
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005195- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5196 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5197 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5198 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5199 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005200
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005201Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005202-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005203
5204Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005205-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005206
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005207- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5208 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5209 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5210 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005211 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5212 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5213 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5214 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5215 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005216
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005217- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005218 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5219
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005220
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005221What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5222===========================
5223
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005224*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5225
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005226Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005227-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005228
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005229- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5230 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5231
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005232- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5233 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5234 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005235
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005236- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5237 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5238 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5239 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005240
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005241- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5242
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005243- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005244
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005245Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005246-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005247
5248- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005249 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005250 the module docstring for details.
5251
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005252Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005253-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005254
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005255- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005256 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5257 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5258 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005259
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005260- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5261 Nick Mathewson.
5262
5263Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005264----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005265
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005266- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5267 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5268 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5269 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5270 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5271 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5272 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5273 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5274
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005275- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5276 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5277 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5278 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5279
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005280- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5281 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5282 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5283 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5284 come a long way).
5285
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005286- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5287 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5288 write filters for these warnings).
5289
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005290- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5291 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5292 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5293 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5294 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5295
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005296- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5297 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5298 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5299 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5300 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5301 older distribution.
5302
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005303Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005304-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005305
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005306- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5307 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005308 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005309
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005310- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5311 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5312 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5313
5314- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5315
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005316- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5317
5318- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5319
5320- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5321
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005322- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005323
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005324- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5325
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005326New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005327-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005328
5329C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005330-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005331
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005332- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5333 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5334 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5335 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5336 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5337 against buffer overruns.
5338
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005339- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005340 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5341 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005342 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5343 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5344 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5345
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005346- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5347 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5348 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5349 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5350 deprecated.
5351
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005352Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005353-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005354
5355- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5356 relevant is found.
5357
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005358
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005359What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005360===========================
5361
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005362*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5363
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005364Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005365----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005366
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005367- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5368 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5369 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5370 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5371 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5372 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5373 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5374 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005375 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005376 repaired.
5377
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005378- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005379 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005380 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5381 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5382 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5383 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5384 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5385 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5386 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5387 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5388
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005389- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5390 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5391 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5392 leading BMO character).
5393
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005394- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5395 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5396 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5397
5398 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5399 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5400 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005401
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005402 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5403 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5404 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5405 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5406 for various simple to use conversions.
5407
5408 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5409 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5410
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005411 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5412 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5413 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5414 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5415 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5416 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5417 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5418 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5419 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5420 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5421 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5422 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5423 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5424 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5425 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005426
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005427- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5428 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5429 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005430 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005431 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005432
5433 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005434 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5435 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5436 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5437 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5438 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005439 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5440 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005441
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005442 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5443 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5444 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005445 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005446
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005447- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5448 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5449 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5450 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5451 floating arithmetic,
5452
5453 x = 9007199254740992.0
5454 print long(x)
5455
5456 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5457 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5458 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5459 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5460 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5461 functions are of good quality).
5462
5463 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5464 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5465 algorithms to break.
5466
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005467- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5468 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5469 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5470 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5471 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5472 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5473 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5474 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5475 order.
5476
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005477- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5478 operation along the most common code paths.
5479
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005480- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5481 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5482
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005483- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5484 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5485 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5486 {}.update(UserDict())
5487
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005488- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5489 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5490 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5491 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5492 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5493 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5494 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5495 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5496
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005497- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005498 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005499
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005500 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005501 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5502 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005503 join() method of strings
5504 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005505 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5506 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005507 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005508 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005509
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005510- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5511 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5512
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005513- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5514 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5515
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005516- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5517 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5518 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5519 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5520
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005521- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5522 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005523 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005524 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5525 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005526
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005527- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5528
5529
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005530Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005531-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005532
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005533- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005534 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005535 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5536 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5537
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005538- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5539 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5540
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005541- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5542 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5543 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5544 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5545
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005546- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5547 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5548 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5549
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005550- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5551
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005552- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5553
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005554- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5555 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5556 that are still imported into string.py).
5557
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005558- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5559
5560- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5561 Now it does.
5562
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005563- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5564
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005565- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5566 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5567 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5568 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5569 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005570 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5571 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005572
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005573- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5574 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5575 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5576 'help(object)'.
5577
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005578Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005579-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005580
5581- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005582 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005583 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5584 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5585
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005586- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005587 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5588 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005589
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005590C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005591-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005592
5593- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5594 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005595
5596----
5597
5598**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**