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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000011
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +000015- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
16
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +000017- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
18
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +000019- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
20 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
21 arguments.
22
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +000023- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
24 See SF bug #667147.
25
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +000026- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
27 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
28 See SF bug #676155.
29
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000030Extension modules
31-----------------
32
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +000033- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
34 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
35
Martin v. Löwis9789aef2003-01-26 11:30:36 +000036- A new module _iconv_codec has been added, to expose the iconv(3)
37 library.
38
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +000039- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
40
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +000041- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
42 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
43 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
44
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000045- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
46
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +000047- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
48 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
49
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000050- datetime changes:
51
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +000052 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
53 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
54 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
55 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
56 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
57 now.
58
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000059 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000060 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
61 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000062
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +000063 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000064 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000065 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
66 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
67 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
68 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000069
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +000070 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
71 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
72 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000073 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
74
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +000075 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
76 by a later example coded by Guido.
77
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +000078 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000079 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
80 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
81 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +000082 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
83 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
84
85 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
86 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
87 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
88 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
89 tzinfo subclass instance.
90
91 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
92 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
93 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
94 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
95 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
96 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
97 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
98 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000099
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000100 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
101 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
102 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
103 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
104 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
105 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to
106 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
107 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
108 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
109 as a naive datetime object.
110
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000111 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
112 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
113 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
114
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000115 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
116 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
117 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
118 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
119 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
120 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
121 comparison.
122
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000123 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
124 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
125 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
126 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
127 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
128
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000129Library
130-------
131
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000132- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
133 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
134 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
135
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000136- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
137
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000138- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
139 exception.
140
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000141- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
142 class.
143
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000144- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
145 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
146 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
147
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000148- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
149 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
150
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000151- realpath is now exported when doing from poxixpath import *.
152 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
153 See SF bug #659228.
154
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000155- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
156 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
157 See SF patch #651082.
158
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000159- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000160
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000161- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
162 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
163
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000164- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000165 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000166
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000167Tools/Demos
168-----------
169
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000170TBD
171
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000172Build
173-----
174
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000175- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
176 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
177 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
178 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
179 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
180 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
181 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
182 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
183 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
184
185- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
186 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
187 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
188 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
189
190- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
191 from the Tools/scripts directory.
192
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000193C API
194-----
195
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000196- The PyArg_Parse functions now raise a TypeError instead of truncating float
197 arguments if an integer is specified (this affects the 'b', 'B', 'h', 'H',
198 'i', and 'l' codes).
199
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000200
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000201New platforms
202-------------
203
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000204TBD
205
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000206Tests
207-----
208
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000209TBD
210
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000211Windows
212-------
213
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000214- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
215 release without strong cryptography.
216
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000217- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
218 absolute pathname.
219
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000220- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
221 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
222
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000223Mac
224---
225
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000226- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
227 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000228
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000229- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
230 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000231
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000232
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000233What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000234=================================
235
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000236*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000237
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000238Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000239--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000240
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000241- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
242
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000243- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
244 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000245 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000246 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000247 a different meaning than before.
248
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000249- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000250 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000251 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000252
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000253- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000254 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000255 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000256
257- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
258 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
259 and deallocation.
260
261- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
262 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
263
264- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
265 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
266 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
267 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
268 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
269
270- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
271 now detected by the garbage collector.
272
273- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
274 [SF bug 519621]
275
276- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
277 identifier.
278
279- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
280 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
281 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
282 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
283 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
284 [SF bug 563060]
285
286- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
287 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
288 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
289 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
290 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
291
292- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
293 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
294 not called. [SF bug #537450]
295
296- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
297
298- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
299 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
300 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
301 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
302 state of the slots would be lost.)
303
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000304Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000305-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000306
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000307- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000308 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
309 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
310 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
311 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000312 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
313 Jython 2.1.
314
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000315- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was inititally developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000316 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000317 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
318 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
319 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
320 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
321 these, see PEP 302.
322
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000323- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
324 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
325 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
326
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000327- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
328 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
329 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
330
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000331- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
332 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
333 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
334
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000335- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
336 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
337 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
338 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
339 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
340 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
341 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
342 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
343 releases or implementations.
344
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000345- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000346 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
347 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000348
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000349- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
350 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
351
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000352- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
353 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
354 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
355
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000356- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
357 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
358
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000359- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
360 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000361 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
362 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000363
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000364- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
365 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
366 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
367 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
368 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
369
370 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
371 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
372 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
373 pattern.
374
375 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
376 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
377 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
378 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
379
380 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
381 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
382 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
383 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
384 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
385 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
386
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000387- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
388 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
389 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
390 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
391 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
392 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
393 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
394 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000395
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000396- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
397 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
398 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
399 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
400 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000401 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
402 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
403 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
404 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
405 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
406 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
407 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000408
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000409- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
410 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
411
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000412- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
413 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
414 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
415 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
416 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
417 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
418 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
419 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
420 to Zack Weinberg!
421
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000422- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
423 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
424 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
425 type. This has been fixed now.
426
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000427- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
428 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
429 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
430
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000431- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
432 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
433 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
434 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
435 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
436 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
437 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
438 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000439 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000440
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000441- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
442 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
443 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000444
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000445- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
446 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
447 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
448 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
449 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
450 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
451 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
452 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000453 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000454 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
455 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
456
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000457- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
458 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
459 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
460 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
461 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
462 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
463 this.)
464
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000465- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
466 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000467 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000468 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000469 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
470 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000471 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
472 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000473
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000474- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
475 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
476 currently running.
477
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000478- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
479 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
480 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
481 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
482
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000483- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
484 as directory names.
485
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000486- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
487 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
488
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000489- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
490 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
491
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000492- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000493 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
494 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000495
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000496- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
497 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
498 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
499 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
500 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
501
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000502- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
503 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
504 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
505 removed.
506
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000507- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
508 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
509 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
510
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000511- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
512 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
513 to __debug__.
514
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000515- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
516 string to the left with zeros. For example,
517 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
518
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000519- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
520 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
521 deprecated now.
522
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000523- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
524 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
525 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000526
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000527- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
528 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
529 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
530 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
531 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000532
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000533- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
534 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
535
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000536- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
537 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
538 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000539 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000540 is backward compatible.
541
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000542- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
543 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
544 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
545 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
546 could access a pointer to freed memory.
547
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000548- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
549 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
550 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
551 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
552 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
553 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000554
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000555- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
556 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
557
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000558- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
559 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
560
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000561- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
562 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
563 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
564 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
565 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
566
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000567- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
568 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
569 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
570
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000571- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000572 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
573
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000574- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
575 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
576 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000577
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000578- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
579 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
580
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000581- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
582 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
583 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
584
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +0000585- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
586
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000587Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000588-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000589
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +0000590- Added three operators to the operator module:
591 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
592 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
593 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
594
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000595- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
596
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000597- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
598 archives.
599
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000600- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
601 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
602 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
603
604 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
605
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000606- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
607 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
608 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000609 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000610
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000611- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
612 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
613 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
614 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
615 3.0 to 4.1.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000616
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000617- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
618 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000619
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000620- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
621
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000622- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
623 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
624
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000625- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
626 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
627 supported.
628
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000629- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
630
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000631- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
632 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000633
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000634- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
635 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
636
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000637- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
638
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000639- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
640 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
641
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000642- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
643 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
644 functions but callable type objects.
645
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000646- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000647 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000648 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000649
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +0000650- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
651 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000652
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000653- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
654 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000655
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000656- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
657 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
658 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
659 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
660
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000661- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
662 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000663
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000664- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
665 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
666 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
667 and __imul__.
668
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000669- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000670 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
671 is called.
672
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000673- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
674 been added where available.
675
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000676- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
677 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
678 interpreter was compiled.
679
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000680- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
681 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
682 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000683 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000684 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
685 1, not 2.
686
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000687- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
688 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
689 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
690 limit.
691
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000692- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
693 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
694 bug #623464.
695
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +0000696- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
697 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
698 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
699 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
700
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000701Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000702-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000703
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +0000704- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
705
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +0000706- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
707 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
708 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
709 with Python 2.3a2.
710
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +0000711- os.path exposes getctime.
712
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +0000713- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
714 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparision
715 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
716 the result to zero. Approximate comparision is essential for
717 unit tests of floating point results.
718
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +0000719- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
720 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
721 has been increased.
722
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000723- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
724 executed.
725
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +0000726- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
727 postinstallation script.
728
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +0000729- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
730 test the current module.
731
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +0000732- When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
733 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
734 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
735 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
736 this behavior needs to be controlled.
737
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000738- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000739 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000740 Ward's Optik package.
741
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000742- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
743 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
744 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
745 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
746
747- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
748 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000749 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000750
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +0000751- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
752 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
753 shelf are binary pickles.
754
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +0000755- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
756 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
757
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +0000758- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
759 modules are iterators now.
760
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +0000761- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
762 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
763 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
764 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
765 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
766 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000767
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +0000768- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
769 with their entity value.
770
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +0000771- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
772
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000773- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
774 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +0000775
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000776- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
777 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000778 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +0000779
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +0000780- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
781 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
782 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
783 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
784 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
785 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
786 main():
787
788 import locale
789 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
790
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +0000791- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
792 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
793
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +0000794- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
795 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
796 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
797 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
798 to the new standard.
799
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +0000800- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
801 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
802 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
803 an extension to the database.
804
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000805- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
806 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
807 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
808 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +0000809 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000810
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000811- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000812 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000813
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000814- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
815 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
816 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
817 bounded integers.
818
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +0000819- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
820 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
821 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
822 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
823 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
824 in existence.
825
826 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
827 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
828 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
829 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
830 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
831 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
832
833 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
834 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
835 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
836 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
837
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +0000838- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
839 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
840 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
841
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +0000842- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
843
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000844- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
845 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
846 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
847 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
848
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +0000849- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
850 argument.
851
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +0000852- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
853 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
854 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
855 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
856 [SF patch 560794].
857
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000858- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
859 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
860 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000861 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
862 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
863 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000864
865- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
866 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +0000867
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +0000868- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
869 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
870 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
871 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +0000872
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +0000873- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
874 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
875 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
876 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
877 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
878
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000879- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +0000880
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +0000881- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
882
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +0000883- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
884 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
885 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
886 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
887 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
888 identical to None.
889
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +0000890- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
891 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
892 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
893 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
894 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
895 results now.
896
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +0000897- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
898 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
899
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000900- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
901 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
902 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
903 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
904 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
905 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
906 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
907 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
908
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +0000909- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
910
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +0000911- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
912 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
913
914- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
915 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
916 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
917 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
918 and other systems.
919
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000920- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
921 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
922 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
923 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 +0000924 work well with these.
925
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +0000926- compileall now supports quiet operation.
927
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000928- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +0000929 connections.
930
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +0000931- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
932 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
933 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
934
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +0000935- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
936 sets
937
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +0000938- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
939 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
940 name.
941
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +0000942- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
943 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
944 passed in.
945
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000946- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +0000947 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +0000948 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
949 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +0000950
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +0000951- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
952
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +0000953- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
954
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +0000955- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
956 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
957 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
958
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000959- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
960 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
961 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
962 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +0000963 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000964
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000965- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000966 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000967 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000968
969- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
970 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
971 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
972
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000973- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +0000974 the value of its expression argument.
975
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000976- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
977 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
978 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
979
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +0000980- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
981 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
982 skipstone browser was included.
983
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +0000984- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
985 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
986
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000987Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000988-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000989
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +0000990- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
991 names in addition to accepting file names.
992
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +0000993- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
994 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
995 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
996 still used and useful.)
997
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +0000998- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
999 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1000 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1001 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001002
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001003- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1004 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1005 the generated binary.
1006
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001007Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001008-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001009
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001010- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1011
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001012- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1013 except in the hands of experts.
1014
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001015- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001016 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1017 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1018 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001019
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001020- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1021 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1022 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1023 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1024 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1025 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1026 builds.
1027
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001028- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1029 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1030 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1031 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1032 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1033 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1034 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1035 new type.
1036
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001037- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001038
1039 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1040 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1041 positive infinities.
1042
1043 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1044 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1045 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1046 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1047 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1048 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1049 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1050
1051 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1052
1053 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1054
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001055- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1056 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1057 size of the executable.
1058
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001059- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1060 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1061 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1062 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001063
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001064- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1065
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001066- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1067 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1068 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001069
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001070- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1071 well as Unix.
1072
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001073- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1074 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1075 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1076 modules in the README file for details.
1077
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001078C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001079-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001080
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001081- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1082 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001083 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001084 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001085 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001086
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001087- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1088 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1089 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1090 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1091 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1092 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
1093 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
1094 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1095 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1096 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1097 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1098 aligned.)
1099
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001100- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1101 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1102 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1103
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001104- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1105 level.
1106
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001107- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1108 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1109 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1110 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1111 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1112
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001113- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1114 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1115 code.
1116
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001117- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1118 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1119 adjusting for negative indices.
1120
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001121- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1122 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1123 object.
1124
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001125- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1126 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1127 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1128
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001129- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1130 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001131
1132- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1133
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001134- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1135 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1136 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1137 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1138
1139- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1140
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001141- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001142
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001143- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001144 without going through the buffer API.
1145
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001146- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001147
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001148- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1149 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1150 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1151 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1152
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001153- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1154 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1155
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001156- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001157 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1158
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001159New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001160-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001161
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001162- OpenVMS is now supported.
1163
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001164- AtheOS is now supported.
1165
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001166- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1167
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001168- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1169
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001170Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001171-----
1172
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001173- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1174 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1175 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001176
1177Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001178-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001179
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001180- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1181 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1182 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1183 bugs.
1184 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001185 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of
1186 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1187 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001188 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001189
1190- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001191 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001192
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001193- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1194 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1195
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001196- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1197 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
1198 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
1199 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1200
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001201- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1202 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1203 use files" uninstall option).
1204
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001205- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1206
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001207- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1208 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1209
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001210- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1211 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1212 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1213
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001214- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1215 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1216 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1217 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1218 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001219 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1220 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1221 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001222
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001223- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001224 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001225 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1226 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1227 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1228 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1229 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1230 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1231 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1232 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1233 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1234 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1235 work around.
1236
1237- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1238 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1239 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1240 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1241 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1242 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1243 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1244 specified with O_CREAT too).
1245
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001246Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001247----
1248
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001249- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001250
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001251- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1252 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1253 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1254
1255- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1256 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1257 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1258 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1259 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1260 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1261 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1262 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001263
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001264- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1265 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1266 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001267
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001268- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1269 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1270 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1271 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1272 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001273
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001274- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1275 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1276 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001277
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001278- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1279 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001280
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001281- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1282 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1283 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1284 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1285 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001286
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001287- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1288 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1289 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1290
1291- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1292 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1293 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001294
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001295- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1296 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1297 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1298 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
1299 Help Viewer comaptible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001300
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001301- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1302 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001303
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001304- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1305 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001306
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001307- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
1308 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was but "ascii", like on
1309 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1310 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001311
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001312What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001313===============================
1314
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001315*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1316
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001317Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001318--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001319
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001320- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1321 with a custom metaclass.
1322
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001323Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001324-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001325
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001326- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1327 are proxies.
1328
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001329Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001330-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001331
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001332- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1333 very short strings.
1334
1335- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1336 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1337 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1338 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1339 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1340
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001341Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001342-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001343
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001344- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1345 close or delete time).
1346
1347- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1348 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1349
1350- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1351
1352- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001353 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001354
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001355Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001356-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001357
1358Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001359-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001360
1361C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001362-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001363
1364New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001365-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001366
1367Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001368-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001369
1370Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001371-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001372
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001373- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1374
1375- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1376 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1377
1378- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1379 deleted at process exit time.
1380
1381- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1382 in backslash.
1383
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001384Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001385----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001386
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001387- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1388 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1389 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1390
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001391
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001392What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001393===========================
1394
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001395*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1396
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001397Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001398--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001399
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001400- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1401 been extensively updated. See
1402
1403 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1404
1405 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1406
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001407- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1408 deleted!
1409
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001410- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1411 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1412 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1413 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1414 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1415
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001416- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1417
1418 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1419 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1420
1421 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1422 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1423 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1424 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1425 supported anyway.
1426
1427 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1428 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1429
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001430- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1431 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1432 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1433 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1434 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001435
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001436- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1437 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1438 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1439
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001440Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001441-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001442
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001443- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1444 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1445 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1446 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1447 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1448 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001449 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1450 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1451 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1452 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001453
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001454- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1455 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1456 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1457
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001458Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001459-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001460
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001461- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1462
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001463Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001464-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001465
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001466- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1467 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1468 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1469 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1470 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1471 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1472
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001473- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1474
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001475- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1476
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001477- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1478
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001479- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1480 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1481 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1482
1483- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1484
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001485Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001486-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001487
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001488- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1489 off a search on Google.
1490
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001491Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001492-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001493
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001494- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1495 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1496 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1497 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1498 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1499 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1500 other platforms should do likewise.
1501
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001502- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1503 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1504 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1505
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001506C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001507-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001508
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001509- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1510 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1511 producing key-value pairs.
1512
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001513- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001514 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001515 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1516 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1517 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1518 previously went unchallenged.
1519
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001520New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001521-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001522
1523Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001524-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001525
1526Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001527-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001528
1529Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001530----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001531
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001532- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1533 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001534
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001535- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1536 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1537 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1538 home.
1539
1540
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001541What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001542===========================
1543
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001544*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1545
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001546Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001547--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001548
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001549- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1550 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001551
1552 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001553 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001554
1555 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1556 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001557 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001558 This needs to be documented.
1559
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001560- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1561 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1562
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001563- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1564 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1565 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1566
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001567- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1568 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1569
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001570- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1571 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1572 class forbids it).
1573
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001574- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1575 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1576 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1577
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001578- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1579
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001580Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001581-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001582
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001583- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1584 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001585 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001586
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001587- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1588 (like 1 + '').
1589
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001590Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001591-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001592
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001593- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1594 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1595 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1596 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001597 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001598 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1599
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001600- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1601 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1602 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1603 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1604
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001605- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1606 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001607 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1608 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1609 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001610
1611- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1612 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001613
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001614- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1615 bytes on its input.
1616
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001617Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001618-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001619
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001620- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001621 convenience function.
1622
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001623- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1624 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1625 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001626 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1627 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1628 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1629 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1630 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1631 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001632
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001633- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1634 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1635 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1636 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1637
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001638- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1639 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1640 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1641
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001642- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1643 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1644 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1645 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1646
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001647- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1648 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001649 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001650 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1651 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1652 new -l and -e options.
1653
1654- statcache is now deprecated.
1655
1656- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1657 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001658 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001659 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1660 time properly taken into account.
1661
1662- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1663 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1664 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1665 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1666
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001667Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001668-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001669
1670Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001671-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001672
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001673- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1674 is built with libdb3 if available.
1675
1676- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1677
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001678C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001679-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001680
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001681- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1682 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1683 PySequence_Size().
1684
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001685- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1686
1687- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1688 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1689 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1690
1691- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1692 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1693
1694- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1695 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1696
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001697New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001698-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001699
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001700- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1701 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1702
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001703- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1704 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1705
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001706- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1707
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001708Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001709-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001710
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001711- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1712 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1713
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001714Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001715-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001716
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001717Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001718----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001719
1720- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1721 removed completely in the next release.
1722
1723- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1724 OSX.
1725
1726- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1727 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1728
1729- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1730
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001731
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001732What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001733===========================
1734
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001735*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
1736
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001737Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001738--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001739
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001740- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001741 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001742 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001743 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
1744 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001745 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
1746 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001747 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
1748 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00001749
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00001750- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
1751 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
1752
1753- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
1754 class methods, static methods, and properties.
1755
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001756Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001757-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001758
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00001759- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
1760 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
1761 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
1762 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
1763 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
1764 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
1765 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
1766 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
1767
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001768- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
1769 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
1770 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
1771 example).
1772
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001773- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001774 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001775 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001776 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001777
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001778- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
1779 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
1780 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00001781 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001782
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001783- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
1784 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
1785 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
1786 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
1787 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
1788 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
1789
1790 isinstance(x, (A, B))
1791
1792 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
1793
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001794Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001795-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001796
1797- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
1798
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001799- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
1800
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001801- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
1802 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00001803
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001804- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
1805 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
1806 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
1807 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
1808 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
1809 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00001810 attributes.
1811
1812- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
1813 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
1814 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00001815
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001816- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
1817 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
1818 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001819
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001820- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
1821 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
1822 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001823 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
1824 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
1825
1826- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
1827 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001828
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001829Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001830-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001831
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00001832- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
1833 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
1834
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001835- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
1836 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
1837 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
1838 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
1839
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00001840- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
1841 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
1842 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
1843 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
1844
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00001845 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
1846 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
1847 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
1848 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
1849 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
1850 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
1851 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
1852 without losing information).
1853
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001854- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00001855 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
1856 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
1857 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
1858 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
1859 module).
1860
1861 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
1862 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
1863 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
1864 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
1865 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001866
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001867- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00001868 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
1869 encoding.
1870
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00001871- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
1872 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
1873
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001874- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001875 to allow saving the message body to a file.
1876
1877- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
1878 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
1879 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
1880 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
1881
1882- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
1883
1884- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
1885 ON, and OFF.
1886
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001887- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
1888 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
1889
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001890Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001891-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001892
1893- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
1894 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
1895 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001896
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001897- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
1898 been added: -X and -E.
1899
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001900Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001901-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001902
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001903- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
1904 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
1905
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001906C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001907-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001908
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00001909- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
1910 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
1911 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
1912 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
1913 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
1914
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00001915- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
1916 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
1917 as long) arguments.
1918
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001919- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
1920 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
1921 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
1922 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
1923 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
1924 report any bugs or strange behavior).
1925
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001926- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
1927 input.
1928
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001929New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001930-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001931
1932Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001933-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001934
1935Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001936-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001937
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00001938- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
1939 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
1940 is created for .py and .pyw files.
1941
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001942- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
1943 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
1944 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001945 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001946
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001947 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
1948 # (SIGINT) behavior.
1949 import signal
1950 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001951
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001952 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001953 while 1:
1954 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001955 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001956 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
1957 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
1958 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
1959 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001960
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001961
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001962What's New in Python 2.2a4?
1963===========================
1964
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001965*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
1966
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001967Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001968--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001969
1970- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
1971 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
1972 documentation for all operations on list objects.
1973
1974- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
1975 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
1976 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
1977 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
1978 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
1979 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
1980 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001981
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001982- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001983 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001984 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
1985 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
1986 associate a docstring with a property.
1987
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001988- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
1989 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
1990 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
1991 other built-in object types.
1992
1993- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
1994 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
1995 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
1996 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
1997 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
1998
1999- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2000 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2001
2002- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2003 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002004 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002005 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2006 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2007 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2008 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2009 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2010
2011- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2012 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2013 class.
2014
2015- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2016 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2017 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2018 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2019
2020- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2021 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2022 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2023 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2024
2025- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2026 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2027
2028- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2029 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2030 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2031 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2032 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002033 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002034 with the same value as s.
2035
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002036- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2037
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002038Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002039----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002040
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002041- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2042
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002043- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2044 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2045 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2046 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2047 objects.
2048
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002049- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2050 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002051 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2052 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2053
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002054- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2055 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2056 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2057
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002058Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002059-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002060
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002061- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2062 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2063 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2064 by the instances.
2065
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002066- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2067 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2068 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2069
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002070- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2071 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2072 before the entire comparison is complete.
2073
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002074- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2075 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2076 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2077
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002078- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2079 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2080 getwriter().
2081
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002082- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2083 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2084
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002085- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002086 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2087 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2088
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002089- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2090 iterable object.
2091
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002092- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2093 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002094
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002095- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2096 authentication.
2097
2098- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2099 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002100
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002101- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002102 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2103 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2104 a sample driver.)
2105
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002106Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002107-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002108
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002109- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2110 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2111 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2112 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2113 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2114 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2115 kernel has large file support.
2116
2117- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2118 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2119 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2120 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2121 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2122
2123- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2124 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2125 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2126
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002127C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002128-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002129
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002130- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2131 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2132
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002133New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002134-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002135
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002136- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2137 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2138
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002139Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002140-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002141
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002142- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2143 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2144 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2145 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2146 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2147
2148- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2149 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2150 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2151 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2152
2153- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2154 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2155
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002156Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002157-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002158
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002159- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002160 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2161 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002162
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002163
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002164What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2165===========================
2166
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002167*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2168
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002169Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002170----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002171
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002172- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2173 big to represent as a C double.
2174
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002175- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2176 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2177 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2178 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2179 restriction).
2180
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002181- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2182 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2183 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2184 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2185 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2186
2187 >>> dir([])
2188 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2189 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2190 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2191 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2192 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2193 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2194 'reverse', 'sort']
2195
2196 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2197
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002198- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002199 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2200 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2201 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2202 OverflowError exception.
2203
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002204- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002205 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002206 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2207 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2208 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2209 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2210 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002211 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002212 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2213 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2214
2215 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2216 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2217 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2218 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002219
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002220- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002221 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2222 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2223 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2224 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2225 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2226 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2227 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2228 once it is created.
2229
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002230- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2231 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2232 (key, value) pairs.
2233
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002234- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002235 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2236 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2237
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002238- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2239 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2240 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2241 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2242 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002243
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002244- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002245 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2246 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2247
2248 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2249
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002250- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002251 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2252
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002253Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002254-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002255
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002256- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002257 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2258 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002259
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002260- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2261 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2262 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2263 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2264 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2265 in this area anymore).
2266
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002267- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2268 threading.Timer.
2269
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002270- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2271 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2272
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002273- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002274 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2275
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002276- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002277 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2278 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2279 converted to Python longs.
2280
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002281- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002282 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2283
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002284- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2285 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2286 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2287
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002288Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002289-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002290
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002291- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2292 division operators as per PEP 238.
2293
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002294Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002295-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002296
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002297- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2298 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2299 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2300 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2301
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002302C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002303-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002304
2305- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002306
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002307- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2308 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002309 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002310
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002311 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2312 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002313 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002314 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002315
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002316- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002317 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2318 module:
2319
2320 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002321
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002322 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2323 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002324
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002325 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2326 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002327
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002328 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2329
2330 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2331
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002332- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002333 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2334 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2335 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002336
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002337New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002338-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002339
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002340- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2341 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2342 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2343 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2344 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002345
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002346Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002347-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002348
2349Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002350-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002351
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002352- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2353 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2354 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2355 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002356 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2357 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2358 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2359 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2360 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002361
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002362- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002363 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2364
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002365
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002366What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2367===========================
2368
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002369*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2370
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002371Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002372-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002373
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002374- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2375 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2376
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002377- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2378 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2379 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002380
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002381- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2382 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2383 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2384 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002385
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002386- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2387
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002388- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002389
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002390Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002391-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002392
2393- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002394 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002395 the module docstring for details.
2396
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002397Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002398-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002399
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002400- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002401 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2402 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2403 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002404
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002405- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2406 Nick Mathewson.
2407
2408Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002409----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002410
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002411- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2412 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2413 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2414 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2415 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2416 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2417 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2418 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2419
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002420- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2421 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2422 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2423 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2424
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002425- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2426 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2427 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2428 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2429 come a long way).
2430
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002431- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2432 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2433 write filters for these warnings).
2434
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002435- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2436 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2437 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2438 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2439 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2440
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002441- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2442 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2443 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2444 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2445 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2446 older distribution.
2447
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002448Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002449-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002450
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002451- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2452 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002453 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002454
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002455- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2456 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2457 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2458
2459- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2460
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002461- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2462
2463- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2464
2465- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2466
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002467- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002468
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002469- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2470
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002471New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002472-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002473
2474C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002475-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002476
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002477- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2478 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2479 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2480 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2481 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2482 against buffer overruns.
2483
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002484- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002485 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2486 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002487 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2488 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2489 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2490
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002491- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2492 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2493 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2494 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2495 deprecated.
2496
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002497Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002498-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002499
2500- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2501 relevant is found.
2502
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002503
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002504What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002505===========================
2506
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002507*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2508
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002509Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002510----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002511
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002512- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2513 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2514 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2515 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2516 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2517 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2518 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2519 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002520 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002521 repaired.
2522
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002523- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002524 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002525 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2526 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2527 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2528 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2529 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2530 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2531 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2532 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2533
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002534- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2535 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2536 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2537 leading BMO character).
2538
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002539- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2540 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2541 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2542
2543 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2544 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2545 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002546
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002547 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2548 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2549 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2550 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2551 for various simple to use conversions.
2552
2553 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2554 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2555
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002556 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2557 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2558 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2559 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2560 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2561 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2562 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2563 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2564 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2565 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2566 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2567 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2568 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2569 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2570 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002571
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002572- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2573 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2574 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002575 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002576 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002577
2578 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002579 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2580 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2581 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2582 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2583 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002584 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2585 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002586
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002587 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2588 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2589 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002590 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002591
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002592- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2593 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2594 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2595 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2596 floating arithmetic,
2597
2598 x = 9007199254740992.0
2599 print long(x)
2600
2601 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2602 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2603 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2604 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2605 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2606 functions are of good quality).
2607
2608 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2609 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2610 algorithms to break.
2611
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002612- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2613 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2614 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2615 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2616 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2617 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2618 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2619 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2620 order.
2621
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002622- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2623 operation along the most common code paths.
2624
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002625- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2626 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2627
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002628- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2629 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2630 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2631 {}.update(UserDict())
2632
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002633- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2634 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2635 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2636 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2637 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2638 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2639 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2640 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2641
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002642- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002643 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002644
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002645 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002646 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2647 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002648 join() method of strings
2649 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002650 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2651 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002652 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002653 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002654
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002655- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2656 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2657
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002658- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2659 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2660
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002661- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2662 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2663 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2664 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2665
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002666- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2667 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002668 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002669 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2670 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002671
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002672- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2673
2674
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002675Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002676-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002677
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002678- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002679 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002680 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2681 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2682
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002683- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2684 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2685
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002686- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2687 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2688 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2689 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2690
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002691- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2692 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2693 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2694
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002695- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2696
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002697- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2698
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002699- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2700 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2701 that are still imported into string.py).
2702
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002703- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2704
2705- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2706 Now it does.
2707
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002708- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2709
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002710- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2711 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2712 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2713 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2714 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002715 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2716 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002717
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002718- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2719 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2720 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2721 'help(object)'.
2722
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002723Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002724-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002725
2726- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002727 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002728 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
2729 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
2730
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002731- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002732 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
2733 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002734
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002735C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002736-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002737
2738- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
2739 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002740
2741----
2742
2743**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**