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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
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +000015- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
16 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
17 modified the list.
18
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +000019- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
20 functions is now writable.
21
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +000022- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
23 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
24 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
25 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
26
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000027- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
28 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
29 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
30 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
31 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000032
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +000033- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
34 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
35
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000036Extension modules
37-----------------
38
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +000039- Added socket.socketpair().
40
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000041Library
42-------
43
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +000044- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
45of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer frame,
46u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
47
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +000048- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
49 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
50 contains symlinks.
51
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +000052- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
53 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
54
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +000055- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
56 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
57 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
58
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000059- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
60 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
61 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
62 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
63 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
64 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
65 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
66 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
67 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
68 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
69 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
70 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
71 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
72
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000073Tools/Demos
74-----------
75
76Build
77-----
78
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +000079- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
80 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
81
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000082C API
83-----
84
85Documentation
86-------------
87
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +000088- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if it contains
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +000089symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment since 1992, but is now in
90the library reference as well.
91
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000092New platforms
93-------------
94
95Tests
96-----
97
98Windows
99-------
100
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000101- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
102 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
103 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
104 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
105 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
106 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
107 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
108 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
109 the problem.
110
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000111Mac
112---
113
114
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000115What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
116=================================
117
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000118*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000119
120Core and builtins
121-----------------
122
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000123- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
124 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
125 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
126 sensitive code.
127
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000128- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
129 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
130 @staticmethod
131 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000132 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000133
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000134- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
135 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
136 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
137 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
138 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
139 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
140 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
141 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
142 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
143 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
144 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
145
146 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
147 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
148 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
149 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
150 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
151 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
152 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
153
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000154- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
155 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
156
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000157- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000158 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000159
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000160- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000161 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000162 which was missing for no apparent reason.
163
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000164- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000165 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
166 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
167
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000168- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
169 types that support garbage collection.
170
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000171- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
172
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000173- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
174 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
175 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
176 Jython.
177
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000178- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
179
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000180- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
181 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
182
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000183- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
184 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
185 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000186
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000187- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
188 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
189 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
190
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000191Extension modules
192-----------------
193
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000194- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
195
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000196Library
197-------
198
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000199- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
200 TIS-620
201
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000202- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
203 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
204 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
205 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
206 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
207 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
208 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
209 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
210 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
211 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
212
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000213- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
214
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000215- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
216 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
217 same as when the argument is omitted).
218 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
219
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000220- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
221
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000222- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
223 schemes are offered.
224
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000225- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
226
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000227- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
228 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
229 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
230
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000231- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
232
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000233- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
234 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
235
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000236- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
237 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
238 when dummy_threading is being used.
239
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000240- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
241 from a tarfile.
242
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000243- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000244 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000245
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000246- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
247 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
248 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
249 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
250
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000251- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
252 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
253
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000254- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
255 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
256 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
257 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
258 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
259 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
260 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
261 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
262 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
263 by some other method in progress).
264
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000265- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
266 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
267 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000268
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000269- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
270
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000271- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
272 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
273 AM Kuchling.
274
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000275- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
276 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
277 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
278
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000279- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
280 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
281 instead of unsigned.
282
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000283- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000284 no longer part of the public API.
285
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000286- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
287 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
288 string methods of the same name).
289
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000290- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000291 SF patch 945642.
292
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000293- doctest unittest integration improvements:
294
295 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
296
297 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
298 DocTestSuites.
299
300- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
301 that provide thread-local data.
302
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000303- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
304 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
305
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000306- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
307
308- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
309 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
310 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
311
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000312- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
313
314 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
315 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
316 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000317
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000318 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
319 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
320 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
321 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
322
323 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
324 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
325
326 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
327 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
328 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
329 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
330
331 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
332 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
333 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
334 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
335 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
336
337 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
338 wrapping help output.
339
340 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
341 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
342 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000343
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000344C API
345-----
346
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000347- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
348 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
349 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
350 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
351 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
352 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
353 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
354 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
355 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
356 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
357 its visible semantics have not changed.
358
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000359- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
360 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
361
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000362Documentation
363-------------
364
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000365- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000366
367 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000368 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000369
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000370 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000371
372 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
373
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000374- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000375
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000376Tests
377-----
378
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000379- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000380 platforms that use the Makefile.
381
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000382- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
383 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
384 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
385
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000386
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000387What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
388=================================
389
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000390*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000391
392Core and builtins
393-----------------
394
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000395- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
396 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
397 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
398 objects now (one object instead of three).
399
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000400- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
401 Windows DLLs.
402
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000403- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
404 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000405
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000406- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
407 a new .pyc magic.
408
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000409- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
410 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
411 be there.
412
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000413- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
414 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
415 the LC_NUMERIC category.
416
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000417- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
418 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
419 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
420
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000421- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
422
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000423- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
424 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
425 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000426
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000427- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
428 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
429
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000430- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
431
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000432- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000433 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000434
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000435- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
436
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000437- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
438
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000439- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
440 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
441
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000442- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
443 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
444 Fixes bug #858016 .
445
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000446- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
447 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
448 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
449
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000450- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
451 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
452 improves their performance (about 35%).
453
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000454- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
455 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
456 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
457
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000458- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
459 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
460 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
461 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
462
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000463- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
464 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
465 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
466 length is not known).
467
468- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
469 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000470 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
471 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000472 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
473
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000474- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
475 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
476
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000477- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
478 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
479 keyword arguments.
480
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000481- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
482 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
483 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
484
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000485- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
486 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
487 cases.
488
489- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
490 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
491 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
492 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
493 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
494 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
495 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
496 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
497 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
498 a release build.
499
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000500- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
501 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
502
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000503- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000504 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000505
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000506- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
507 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
508 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
509 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
510 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
511 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
512 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
513 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
514 destroyed.
515
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000516- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
517 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
518 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
519 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
520 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
521 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
522 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
523 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
524
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000525- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
526 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
527 character other than a space.
528
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000529- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
530 by the function object or by the method object, the function
531 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
532 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
533 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
534 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
535 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
536 attributes with the same name.
537
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000538- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
539 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
540 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
541 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
542 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
543 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
544 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
545 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
546 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
547 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
548 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
549 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
550 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
551 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000552
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000553- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
554 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
555 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
556 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
557 This has been repaired.
558
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000559- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
560
561- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
562
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000563- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
564 over a sequence.
565
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000566- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000567 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000568
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000569- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
570
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000571- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
572 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
573 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
574 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
575 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
576 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
577 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
578 records with equal keys is unchanged).
579
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000580- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
581 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
582 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
583
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000584- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
585 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
586 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
587 freelist.
588
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000589- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
590 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
591
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000592- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
593 number.
594
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000595- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
596 a TypeError exception.
597
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000598- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
599 820195.
600
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000601- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
602 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
603 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
604
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000605- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000606 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
607 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000608
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000609- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
610 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
611 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
612
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000613- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
614 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000615 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000616
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000617- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000618 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
619 the first call.
620
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000621
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000622Extension modules
623-----------------
624
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000625- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
626 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
627
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000628- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
629 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
630 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
631 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
632 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
633 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
634 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000635
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000636- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
637
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000638- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
639
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000640- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
641 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
642
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000643- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
644 fewer false positives.
645
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000646- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
647 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
648
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000649- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000650 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
651
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000652- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000653 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000654 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
655 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
656 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000657
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000658- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
659 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
660 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
661 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
662
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000663- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
664 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
665 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
666 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
667 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
668 #897625.
669
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000670- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
671 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
672
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000673- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
674 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
675 and pops on either side of the deque.
676
677- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
678 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
679
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000680- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
681 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
682 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
683 other functions that expect a function argument.
684
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000685- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
686
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000687- os.getsid was added.
688
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000689- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
690 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
691 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
692
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000693- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
694
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000695- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
696
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000697- readline.clear_history was added.
698
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000699- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
700
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000701- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
702
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000703- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
704
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000705- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
706
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000707- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
708
709- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
710
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000711- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
712
713- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
714
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000715- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
716 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
717 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
718
719- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
720 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
721 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
722 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
723 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
724 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
725 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
726
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000727- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
728 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
729 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
730 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000731
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000732- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000733 iterators from a single iterable.
734
735- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
736 of raising a TypeError exception.
737
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000738- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
739 as parameter.
740
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000741Library
742-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000743
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000744- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
745 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
746 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000747
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000748- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
749 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
750 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000751
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000752- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000753
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000754- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
755 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000756
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000757- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
758 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
759
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000760- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
761
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000762- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000763 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000764
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000765- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
766 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
767
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000768- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
769
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000770- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
771 on cygwin and mingw32.
772
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000773- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
774
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000775- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
776 module.
777
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000778- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
779 installation scheme for all platforms.
780
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000781- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000782 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000783
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000784- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
785 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
786 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
787
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000788- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
789 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
790 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
791
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000792- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
793
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000794- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
795
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000796- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
797 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
798
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000799- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
800 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
801 type pattern with the same value exists.
802
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000803- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
804 when run from the command prompt).
805
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000806- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
807 not taken into consideration when caching value.
808
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000809- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
810 default sort).
811
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000812- Added global runctx function to profile module
813
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000814- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
815
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000816- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
817
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000818- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
819
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000820- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000821 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
822 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
823 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
824 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
825 accordingly.
826
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000827- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
828 decoding standards.
829
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000830- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
831 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
832 called for all requests.
833
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000834- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
835 they are passed to the compiler.
836
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000837- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
838 indent, width and depth.
839
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000840- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
841 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
842
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000843- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
844 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
845
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000846- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
847
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000848- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
849
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000850- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
851
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000852- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
853 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
854
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000855- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000856 for better performance.
857
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000858- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000859
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000860- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
861 a string).
862
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000863- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
864
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000865- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
866
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000867- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
868
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000869- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
870
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000871- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
872 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
873 list of fieldnames.
874
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000875- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
876 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
877
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000878- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
879
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000880- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
881 empty lists.
882
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000883- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
884 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
885 and shelves.
886
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000887- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
888 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
889
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000890- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000891 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
892 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000893
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000894- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
895 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000896 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000897
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000898- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000899 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
900 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
901
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000902- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
903 and removed in Py2.4.
904
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000905- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
906
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000907- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
908
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000909Tools/Demos
910-----------
911
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000912- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
913 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
914
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000915- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
916
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000917- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
918 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
919 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
920 destination in situations where both files are given.
921
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000922- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
923 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
924 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
925 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
926
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000927- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
928
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000929- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
930 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
931 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
932 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
933 now.
934
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000935- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
936 in effect
937
938- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
939 C-c C-h
940
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000941- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
942 -d option was given.
943
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000944Build
945-----
946
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000947- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
948 build under OS X.
949
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000950- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
951 --enable-profiling.
952
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000953- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
954 is configured --with-tsc.
955
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000956- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
957 on AMD64.
958
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000959- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
960 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
961
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000962- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
963 removed.
964
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000965- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
966 supported (see PEP 11).
967
968- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
969
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000970- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
971
972- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
973 (see PEP 11).
974
975- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
976 sizeof(char) must be 1.
977
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000978C API
979-----
980
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000981- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
982 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
983 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
984
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000985- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
986 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
987 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
988 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
989
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000990- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
991 generator objects.
992
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000993- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
994 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000995 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
996 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000997
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000998- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
999 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1000
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001001- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1002 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1003 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1004 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1005 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1006
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001007- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1008 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1009 about 10% faster.
1010
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001011- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1012 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1013
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001014- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1015 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1016 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1017 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1018
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001019Windows
1020-------
1021
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001022- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1023 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1024 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1025 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1026
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001027- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1028 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1029 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1030
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001031
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001032What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1033===============================
1034
1035*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1036
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001037IDLE
1038----
1039
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001040- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1041 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1042 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1043 context-menu actions.
1044
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001045- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1046 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1047 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1048 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1049 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1050 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1051 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1052 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1053 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1054
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001055
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001056What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1057=============================================
1058
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001059*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001060
1061Core and builtins
1062-----------------
1063
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001064- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001065 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001066 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1067
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001068Extension modules
1069-----------------
1070
1071- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1072 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1073 than once. This has been fixed.
1074
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001075- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1076 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1077 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1078 call.
1079
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001080- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1081
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001082Library
1083-------
1084
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001085- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1086 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1087
1088- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1089 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1090 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1091 restored.
1092
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001093IDLE
1094----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001095
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001096- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001097
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001098Build
1099-----
1100
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001101- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1102 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1103
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001104C API
1105-----
1106
1107Windows
1108-------
1109
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001110- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1111 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1112
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001113- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1114
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001115Mac
1116---
1117
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001118- Various fixes to pimp.
1119
1120- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1121
1122- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1123 more problems than it solves.
1124
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001125
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001126What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1127=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001128
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001129*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1130
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001131Core and builtins
1132-----------------
1133
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001134- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1135 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1136
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001137- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1138 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001139 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001140
1141- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1142 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1143 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001144 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001145
1146- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1147 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001148
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001149- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1150 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1151 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1152
1153- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001154 770247.
1155
1156- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001157
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001158Extension modules
1159-----------------
1160
1161- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1162 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1163
1164- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1165
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001166- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1167
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001168- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1169 contained within the _strptime module.
1170
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001171- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1172 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1173
1174- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001175 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1176
1177- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1178 the find_class attribute, if present.
1179
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001180- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001181
1182 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1183 (SF bug 763298).
1184
1185 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001186 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1187 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1188 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001189
1190 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1191
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001192Library
1193-------
1194
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001195- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1196
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001197- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1198 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1199 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1200 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1201 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1202 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1203 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1204 or Tester().
1205
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001206- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1207 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1208 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1209 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1210 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1211 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1212 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1213 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1214 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001215
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001216 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001217
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001218- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1219 weren't before was an oversight.
1220
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001221- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1222 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1223
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001224- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1225 when there are no lines.
1226
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001227- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1228 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1229
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001230- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1231 to child processes.
1232
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001233- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1234
1235- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1236
1237- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1238 xmlrpclib.
1239
1240- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1241 responses.
1242
1243- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1244 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1245
1246- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1247 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1248 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1249
1250- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1251 used as patterns.
1252
1253- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1254 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1255 than Tk 8.3.
1256
1257- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1258
1259- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001260
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001261Tools/Demos
1262-----------
1263
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001264- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1265
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001266- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1267
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001268- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001269
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001270Build
1271-----
1272
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001273- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1274
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001275- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1276
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001277- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1278 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001279
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001280- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1281 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1282 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001283
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001284C API
1285-----
1286
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001287- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1288 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1289
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001290Windows
1291-------
1292
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001293- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1294 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1295 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1296 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1297 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1298 Python exception ::
1299
1300 thread.error: can't start new thread
1301
1302 is raised now.
1303
1304- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1305 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1306 instead of from DLL teardown.
1307
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001308Mac
1309---
1310
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001311- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001312 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001313 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1314 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1315 the executable in the bundle.
1316
1317- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001318
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001319- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1320
1321- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1322 on Panther.
1323
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001324What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1325================================
1326
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001327*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001328
1329Core and builtins
1330-----------------
1331
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001332- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1333 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1334 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1335 with the -i option.
1336
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001337- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1338 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1339
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001340- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1341 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1342
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001343- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1344 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1345 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1346 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1347 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1348 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1349 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1350 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1351 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1352 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1353 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1354 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1355 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001356
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001357- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1358 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1359 embedded in a lambda expression.
1360
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001361- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1362 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1363 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1364 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1365 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1366
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001367- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1368 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1369 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1370
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001371- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1372 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1373
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001374- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1375 It's writable again.
1376
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001377- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1378 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1379 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001380 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001381
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001382- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1383 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1384 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1385
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001386Extension modules
1387-----------------
1388
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001389- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1390 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1391
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001392- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1393 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1394 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1395 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1396
1397- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1398 collection.
1399
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001400- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1401 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1402 unique within a single program run.
1403
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001404- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1405 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1406
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001407- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1408 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1409
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001410- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1411 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001412
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001413- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1414
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001415- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1416 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1417
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001418- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1419 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1420 for many BSD-derived systems.
1421
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001422
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001423Library
1424-------
1425
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001426- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1427 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1428 primary ones:
1429
1430 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1431 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1432 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1433
1434 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1435 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1436 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1437 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1438 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1439 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1440
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001441- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1442 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1443 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1444 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1445 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1446 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1447 argument.
1448
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001449- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1450 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1451 in the archive.
1452
1453- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1454 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1455
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001456- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1457 569574).
1458
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001459- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1460 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1461 no more.
1462
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001463- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1464 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1465 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1466 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1467 code coverage.
1468
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001469- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1470 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1471 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001472 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1473 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001474
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001475- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1476 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1477 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001478 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001479
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001480- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1481
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001482- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1483 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1484 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1485 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1486
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001487- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1488 handling.
1489
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001490- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1491 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1492
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001493- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1494 in socket.py.
1495
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001496- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1497
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001498- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1499 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1500 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1501 opener with proxy support.
1502
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001503- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1504
1505- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1506
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001507Tools/Demos
1508-----------
1509
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001510- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1511
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001512- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1513
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001514- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1515 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001516
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001517- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1518 files.
1519
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001520Build
1521-----
1522
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001523- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001524 different root directory.
1525
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001526C API
1527-----
1528
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001529- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1530 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1531 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1532 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1533 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1534 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1535 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1536 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1537 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1538 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1539
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001540- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1541 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1542 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1543 from Python.
1544
1545
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001546New platforms
1547-------------
1548
1549None this time.
1550
1551Tests
1552-----
1553
1554- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1555 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1556
1557Windows
1558-------
1559
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001560- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1561
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001562- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1563 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1564 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1565 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1566 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1567 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1568 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1569 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1570 that's what it's for.
1571
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001572Mac
1573---
1574
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001575- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1576 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1577 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1578 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001579- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1580 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1581- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001582
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001583SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1584------------------------------------
1585
1586430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1587598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1588622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1589661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1590683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1591697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1592713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1593724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1594727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1595729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1596730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1597731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1598732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1599733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1600735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1601740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1602744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1603745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1604747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1605749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1606751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1607753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1608755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1609757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1610760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1611
1612
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001613What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1614================================
1615
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001616*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001617
1618Core and builtins
1619-----------------
1620
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001621- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1622 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1623
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001624- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1625 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1626 and cannot be strings).
1627
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001628- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1629 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1630 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1631 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1632
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001633- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1634 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1635 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1636 Python itself.
1637
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001638- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1639 the referenced object, if it has one.
1640
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001641- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1642 the thread started at
1643 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1644
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001645- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1646 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1647 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1648 placed on a list index.
1649
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001650- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1651 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1652 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1653 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1654
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001655- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1656 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1657 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1658 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1659 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1660 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1661 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1662
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001663- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1664 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1665 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1666 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1667 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1668
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001669- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1670 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001671
1672- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1673 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1674 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1675 #693195.)
1676
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001677- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1678 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001679
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001680- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001681 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001682 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1683 interpreter executions, would fail.
1684
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001685- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001686 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001687 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001688
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001689Extension modules
1690-----------------
1691
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001692- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1693 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1694 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1695 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1696
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001697- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1698 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1699
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001700- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1701 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1702 and Greg Chapman.)
1703
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001704- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1705 recursively.
1706
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001707- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001708 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1709 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1710 leaks.
1711
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001712- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1713
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001714- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1715 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1716 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1717 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1718 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1719 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1720 #705836.
1721
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001722- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001723 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1724
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001725- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1726 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1727 See SF bug #692416.
1728
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001729- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1730 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1731
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001732- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1733 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1734 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001735
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001736- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001737 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1738 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1739
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001740- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1741 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1742 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1743 timeouts to work properly.
1744
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001745Library
1746-------
1747
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001748- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1749 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1750 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1751 future release.
1752
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001753- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1754 for querying platform dependent features.
1755
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001756- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001757
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001758- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1759 pickle protocol versions.
1760
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001761- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1762 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1763 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1764
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001765- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1766
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001767- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1768 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1769 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1770 modules.
1771
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001772- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1773 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1774 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1775
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001776- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1777 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1778
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001779- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1780 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1781 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1782
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001783- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001784 MS Office extensions.
1785
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001786- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1787 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1788
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001789- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1790 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1791
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001792- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1793 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1794 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1795 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1796 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1797 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1798
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001799- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1800 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1801 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001802
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001803- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1804 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1805 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1806
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001807- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1808
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001809- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1810 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1811 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1812
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001813Tools/Demos
1814-----------
1815
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001816- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1817 See the module docstring for details.
1818
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001819Build
1820-----
1821
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001822- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1823 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001824
1825C API
1826-----
1827
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001828- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1829
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001830- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1831 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1832 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1833
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001834- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1835 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001836
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001837 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1838 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1839 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001840
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001841- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001842 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1843
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001844- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1845 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1846 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001847
1848New platforms
1849-------------
1850
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001851None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001852
1853Tests
1854-----
1855
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001856- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1857 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001858
1859Windows
1860-------
1861
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001862- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1863 function.
1864
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001865- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1866 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001867
1868Mac
1869---
1870
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001871- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1872 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001873
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001874- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1875 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001876
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001877- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1878 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1879 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001880
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001881- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001882 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1883 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001884
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001885- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1886 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001887
1888
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001889What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1890=================================
1891
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001892*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001893
1894Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001895-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001896
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001897- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1898 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1899 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1900
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001901- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1902 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1903 (SF patch #664376.)
1904
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001905- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1906 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1907 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1908 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1909 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1910 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001911 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001912
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001913- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1914 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1915 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1916 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001917 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001918
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001919- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1920 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1921 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1922 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1923 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1924 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1925 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1926 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1927 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1928 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1929 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1930
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001931- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1932 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1933 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1934 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1935 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1936 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1937
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001938- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1939 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1940
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001941- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1942 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1943 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1944 case.)
1945
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001946- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1947 passed as unicode strings.
1948
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001949- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1950 See SF bug #683467.
1951
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001952- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1953 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1954
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001955- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1956
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001957- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1958
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001959- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1960 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1961 arguments.
1962
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001963- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1964 See SF bug #667147.
1965
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001966- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001967 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001968 See SF bug #676155.
1969
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001970- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001971 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001972 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1973 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1974 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1975 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1976 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1977 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001978
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001979Extension modules
1980-----------------
1981
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001982- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1983 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1984 tp_as_number pointer.
1985
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001986- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1987 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1988 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1989 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1990 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1991
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001992- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1993
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001994- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1995
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001996- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001997 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001998 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1999 patch #678531.)
2000
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002001- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2002 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2003
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002004- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2005 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2006
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002007- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2008
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002009- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2010 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2011 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2012
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002013- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2014
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002015- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2016 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2017
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002018- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002019
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002020- datetime changes:
2021
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002022 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2023
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002024 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2025 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2026 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2027 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2028 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2029 now.
2030
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002031 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002032 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2033 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002034
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002035 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002036 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002037 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2038 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2039 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2040 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002041
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002042 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2043 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2044 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002045 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2046
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002047 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2048 by a later example coded by Guido.
2049
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002050 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002051 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2052 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2053 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002054 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2055 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2056
2057 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2058 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2059 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2060 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2061 tzinfo subclass instance.
2062
2063 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2064 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2065 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2066 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2067 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2068 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2069 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2070 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002071
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002072 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2073 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2074 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2075 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2076 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002077 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2078
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002079 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002080
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002081 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2082 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2083 as a naive datetime object.
2084
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002085 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2086 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2087 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2088
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002089 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2090 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2091 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2092 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2093 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2094 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2095 comparison.
2096
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002097 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2098 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2099 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2100 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002101 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002102
2103 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002104
2105 and ::
2106
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002107 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2108
2109 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2110 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2111 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2112 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2113
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002114 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2115 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2116 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2117 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2118 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2119
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002120 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2121 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002122 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2123 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002124
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002125Library
2126-------
2127
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002128- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2129 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2130
2131- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2132 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2133 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2134 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2135 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2136 See PEP 307 for details.
2137
2138- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2139 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2140
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002141- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2142 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002143 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002144 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2145 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002146 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002147
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002148- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2149 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2150
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002151- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2152 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2153 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2154
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002155- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2156
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002157- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2158 exception.
2159
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002160- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2161 class.
2162
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002163- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2164 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2165 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2166
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002167- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2168 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2169
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002170- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002171 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2172 See SF bug #659228.
2173
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002174- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2175 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2176 See SF patch #651082.
2177
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002178- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002179
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002180- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2181 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2182
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002183- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002184 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002185
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002186- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2187 DOS paths from other platforms.
2188
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002189Tools/Demos
2190-----------
2191
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002192- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2193 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2194 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2195 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2196 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2197 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2198 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2199 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2200 example:
2201
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002202 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2203 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002204
2205 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2206
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002207
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002208Build
2209-----
2210
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002211- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2212 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2213 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002214 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2215
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002216 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2217
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002218- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2219 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2220 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2221 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2222 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2223 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2224 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2225 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2226 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2227
2228- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2229 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2230 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2231 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2232
2233- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2234 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2235
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002236C API
2237-----
2238
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002239- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2240 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002241
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002242- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2243 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2244 tp_as_number pointer.
2245
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002246- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2247 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2248 (SF #681367)
2249
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002250- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2251 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2252 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2253 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002254
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002255Tests
2256-----
2257
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002258- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002259 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2260 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2261 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2262 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2263 pydoc.)
2264
2265- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2266
2267- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002268
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002269Windows
2270-------
2271
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002272- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2273 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2274 time).
2275
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002276- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2277 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2278
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002279- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2280 release without strong cryptography.
2281
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002282- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002283 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002284
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002285- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2286 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2287
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002288Mac
2289---
2290
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002291- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2292 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002293
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002294- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2295 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2296 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002297
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002298- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2299 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002300
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002301- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2302 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2303 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2304 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002305
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002306- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002307 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2308 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2309 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002310
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002311
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002312What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002313=================================
2314
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002315*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002316
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002317Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002318--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002319
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002320- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2321
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002322- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2323 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002324 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002325 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002326 a different meaning than before.
2327
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002328- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002329 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002330 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002331
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002332- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002333 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002334 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002335
2336- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2337 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2338 and deallocation.
2339
2340- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2341 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2342
2343- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2344 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2345 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2346 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2347 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2348
2349- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2350 now detected by the garbage collector.
2351
2352- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2353 [SF bug 519621]
2354
2355- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2356 identifier.
2357
2358- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2359 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2360 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2361 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2362 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2363 [SF bug 563060]
2364
2365- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2366 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2367 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2368 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2369 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2370
2371- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2372 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2373 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2374
2375- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2376
2377- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2378 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2379 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2380 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2381 state of the slots would be lost.)
2382
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002383Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002384-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002385
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002386- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002387 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2388 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2389 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2390 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002391 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2392 Jython 2.1.
2393
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002394- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002395 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002396 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2397 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2398 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2399 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2400 these, see PEP 302.
2401
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002402- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2403 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2404 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2405
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002406- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2407 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2408 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2409
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002410- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2411 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2412 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2413
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002414- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2415 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2416 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2417 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2418 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2419 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2420 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2421 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2422 releases or implementations.
2423
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002424- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002425 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2426 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002427
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002428- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2429 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2430
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002431- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2432 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2433 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2434
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002435- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2436 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2437
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002438- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2439 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002440 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2441 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002442
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002443- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2444 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2445 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2446 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2447 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2448
2449 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2450 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2451 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2452 pattern.
2453
2454 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2455 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2456 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2457 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2458
2459 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2460 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2461 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2462 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2463 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2464 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2465
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002466- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2467 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2468 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2469 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2470 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2471 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2472 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2473 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002474
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002475- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2476 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2477 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2478 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2479 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002480 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2481 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2482 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2483 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2484 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2485 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2486 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002487
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002488- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2489 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2490
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002491- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2492 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2493 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2494 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2495 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2496 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2497 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2498 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2499 to Zack Weinberg!
2500
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002501- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2502 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2503 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2504 type. This has been fixed now.
2505
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002506- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2507 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2508 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2509
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002510- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2511 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2512 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2513 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2514 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2515 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2516 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2517 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002518 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002519
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002520- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2521 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2522 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002523
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002524- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2525 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2526 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2527 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2528 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2529 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2530 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2531 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002532 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002533 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2534 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2535
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002536- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2537 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2538 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2539 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2540 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2541 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2542 this.)
2543
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002544- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2545 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002546 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002547 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002548 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2549 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002550 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2551 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002552
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002553- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2554 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2555 currently running.
2556
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002557- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2558 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2559 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2560 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2561
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002562- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2563 as directory names.
2564
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002565- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2566 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2567
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002568- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2569 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2570
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002571- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002572 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2573 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002574
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002575- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2576 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2577 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2578 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2579 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2580
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002581- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2582 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2583 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2584 removed.
2585
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002586- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2587 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2588 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2589
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002590- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2591 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2592 to __debug__.
2593
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002594- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2595 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2596 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2597
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002598- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2599 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2600 deprecated now.
2601
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002602- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2603 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2604 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002605
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002606- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2607 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2608 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2609 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2610 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002611
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002612- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2613 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2614
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002615- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2616 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2617 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002618 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002619 is backward compatible.
2620
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002621- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2622 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2623 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2624 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2625 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2626
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002627- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2628 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2629 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2630 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2631 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2632 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002633
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002634- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2635 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2636
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002637- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2638 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2639
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002640- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2641 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2642 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2643 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2644 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2645
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002646- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2647 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2648 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2649
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002650- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002651 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2652
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002653- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2654 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2655 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002656
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002657- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2658 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2659
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002660- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2661 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2662 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2663
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002664- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2665
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002666Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002667-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002668
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002669- Added three operators to the operator module:
2670 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2671 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2672 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2673
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002674- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2675
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002676- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2677 archives.
2678
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002679- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2680 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2681 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2682
2683 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2684
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002685- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2686 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2687 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002688 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002689
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002690- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2691 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2692 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2693 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002694 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2695 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2696 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2697 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002698
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002699- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2700 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002701
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002702- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2703
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002704- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2705 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2706
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002707- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2708 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2709 supported.
2710
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002711- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2712
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002713- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2714 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002715
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002716- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2717 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2718
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002719- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2720
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002721- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2722 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2723
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002724- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2725 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2726 functions but callable type objects.
2727
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002728- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002729 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002730 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002731
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002732- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2733 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002734
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002735- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2736 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002737
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002738- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2739 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2740 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2741 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2742
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002743- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2744 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002745
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002746- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2747 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2748 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2749 and __imul__.
2750
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002751- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002752 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2753 is called.
2754
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002755- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2756 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2757 interpreter was compiled.
2758
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002759- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2760 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2761 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002762 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002763 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2764 1, not 2.
2765
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002766- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2767 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2768 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2769 limit.
2770
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002771- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2772 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2773 bug #623464.
2774
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002775- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2776 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2777 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2778 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2779
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002780Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002781-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002782
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002783- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2784
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002785- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2786 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2787 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2788 with Python 2.3a2.
2789
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002790- os.path exposes getctime.
2791
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002792- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002793 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002794 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002795 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002796 unit tests of floating point results.
2797
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002798- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2799 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2800 has been increased.
2801
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002802- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2803 executed.
2804
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002805- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2806 postinstallation script.
2807
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002808- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2809 test the current module.
2810
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002811- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002812 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2813 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2814 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2815 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2816
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002817- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002818 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002819 Ward's Optik package.
2820
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002821- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2822 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2823 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2824 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2825
2826- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2827 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002828 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002829
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002830- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2831 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2832 shelf are binary pickles.
2833
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002834- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2835 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2836
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002837- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2838 modules are iterators now.
2839
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002840- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2841 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2842 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2843 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2844 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2845 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002846
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002847- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2848 with their entity value.
2849
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002850- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2851
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002852- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2853 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002854
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002855- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2856 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002857 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002858
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002859- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2860 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2861 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2862 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2863 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2864 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2865 main():
2866
2867 import locale
2868 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2869
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002870- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2871 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2872
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002873- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2874 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2875 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2876 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2877 to the new standard.
2878
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002879- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2880 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2881 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2882 an extension to the database.
2883
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002884- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2885 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2886 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2887 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002888 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002889
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002890- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002891 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002892
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002893- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2894 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2895 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2896 bounded integers.
2897
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002898- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2899 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2900 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2901 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2902 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2903 in existence.
2904
2905 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2906 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2907 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2908 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2909 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2910 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2911
2912 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2913 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2914 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2915 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2916
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002917- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2918 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2919 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2920
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002921- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2922
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002923- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2924 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2925 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2926 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2927
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002928- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2929 argument.
2930
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002931- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2932 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2933 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2934 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2935 [SF patch 560794].
2936
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002937- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2938 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2939 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002940 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2941 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2942 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002943
2944- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2945 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002946
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002947- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2948 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2949 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2950 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002951
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002952- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2953 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2954 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2955 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2956 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2957
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002958- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002959
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002960- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2961
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002962- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2963 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2964 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2965 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2966 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2967 identical to None.
2968
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002969- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2970 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2971 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2972 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2973 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2974 results now.
2975
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002976- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2977 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2978
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002979- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2980 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2981 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2982 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2983 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2984 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2985 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2986 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2987
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002988- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2989
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002990- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2991 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2992
2993- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2994 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2995 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2996 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2997 and other systems.
2998
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002999- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3000 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3001 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3002 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 +00003003 work well with these.
3004
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003005- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3006
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003007- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003008 connections.
3009
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003010- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3011 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3012 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3013
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003014- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3015 sets
3016
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003017- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3018 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3019 name.
3020
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003021- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3022 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3023 passed in.
3024
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003025- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003026 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003027 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3028 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003029
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003030- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3031
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003032- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3033
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003034- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3035 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3036 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3037
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003038- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3039 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3040 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3041 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003042 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003043
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003044- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003045 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003046 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003047
3048- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3049 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3050 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3051
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003052- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003053 the value of its expression argument.
3054
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003055- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3056 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3057 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3058
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003059- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3060 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3061 skipstone browser was included.
3062
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003063- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3064 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3065
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003066Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003067-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003068
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003069- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3070 names in addition to accepting file names.
3071
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003072- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3073 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3074 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3075 still used and useful.)
3076
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003077- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3078 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3079 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3080 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003081
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003082- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3083 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3084 the generated binary.
3085
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003086Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003087-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003088
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003089- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3090
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003091- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3092 except in the hands of experts.
3093
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003094- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003095 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3096 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3097 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003098
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003099- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3100 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3101 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3102 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3103 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3104 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3105 builds.
3106
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003107- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3108 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3109 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3110 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3111 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3112 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3113 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3114 new type.
3115
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003116- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003117
3118 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3119 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3120 positive infinities.
3121
3122 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3123 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3124 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3125 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3126 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3127 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3128 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3129
3130 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3131
3132 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3133
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003134- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3135 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3136 size of the executable.
3137
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003138- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3139 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3140 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3141 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003142
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003143- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3144
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003145- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3146 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3147 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003148
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003149- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3150 well as Unix.
3151
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003152- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3153 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3154 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3155 modules in the README file for details.
3156
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003157C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003158-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003159
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003160- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3161 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003162 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003163 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003164 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003165
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003166- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3167 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3168 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3169 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3170 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3171 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003172 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003173 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3174 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3175 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3176 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3177 aligned.)
3178
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003179- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3180 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3181 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3182
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003183- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3184 level.
3185
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003186- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3187 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3188 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3189 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3190 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3191
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003192- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3193 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3194 code.
3195
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003196- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3197 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3198 adjusting for negative indices.
3199
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003200- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3201 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3202 object.
3203
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003204- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3205 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3206 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3207
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003208- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3209 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003210
3211- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3212
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003213- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3214 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3215 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3216 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3217
3218- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3219
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003220- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003221
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003222- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003223 without going through the buffer API.
3224
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003225- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003226
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003227- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3228 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3229 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3230 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3231
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003232- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3233 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3234
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003235- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003236 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3237
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003238New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003239-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003240
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003241- OpenVMS is now supported.
3242
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003243- AtheOS is now supported.
3244
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003245- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3246
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003247- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3248
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003249Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003250-----
3251
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003252- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3253 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3254 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003255
3256Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003257-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003258
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003259- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3260 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3261 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3262 bugs.
3263 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003264 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003265 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3266 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003267 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003268
3269- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003270 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003271
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003272- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3273 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3274
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003275- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3276 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003277 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003278 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3279
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003280- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3281 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3282 use files" uninstall option).
3283
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003284- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3285
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003286- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3287 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3288
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003289- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3290 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3291 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3292
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003293- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3294 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3295 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3296 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3297 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003298 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3299 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3300 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003301
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003302- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003303 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003304 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3305 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3306 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3307 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3308 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3309 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3310 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3311 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3312 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3313 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3314 work around.
3315
3316- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3317 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3318 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3319 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3320 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3321 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3322 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3323 specified with O_CREAT too).
3324
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003325Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003326----
3327
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003328- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003329
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003330- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3331 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3332 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3333
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003334- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3335 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3336 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3337
3338- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3339 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3340 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3341 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3342 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3343 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3344 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3345 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003346
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003347- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3348 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3349 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003350
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003351- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3352 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3353 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3354 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3355 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003356
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003357- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3358 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3359 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003360
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003361- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3362 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003363
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003364- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3365 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3366 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3367 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3368 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003369
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003370- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3371 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3372 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3373
3374- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3375 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3376 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003377
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003378- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3379 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3380 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3381 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003382 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003383
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003384- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3385 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003386
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003387- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3388 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003389
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003390- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003391 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003392 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3393 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003394
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003395
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003396What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003397===============================
3398
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003399*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3400
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003401Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003402--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003403
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003404- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3405 with a custom metaclass.
3406
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003407Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003408-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003409
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003410- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3411 are proxies.
3412
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003413Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003414-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003415
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003416- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3417 very short strings.
3418
3419- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3420 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3421 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3422 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3423 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3424
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003425Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003426-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003427
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003428- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3429 close or delete time).
3430
3431- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3432 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3433
3434- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3435
3436- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003437 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003438
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003439Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003440-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003441
3442Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003443-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003444
3445C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003446-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003447
3448New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003449-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003450
3451Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003452-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003453
3454Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003455-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003456
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003457- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3458
3459- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3460 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3461
3462- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3463 deleted at process exit time.
3464
3465- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3466 in backslash.
3467
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003468Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003469----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003470
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003471- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3472 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3473 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3474
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003475
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003476What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003477===========================
3478
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003479*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3480
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003481Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003482--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003483
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003484- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3485 been extensively updated. See
3486
3487 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3488
3489 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3490
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003491- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3492 deleted!
3493
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003494- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3495 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3496 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3497 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3498 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3499
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003500- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3501
3502 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3503 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3504
3505 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3506 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3507 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3508 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3509 supported anyway.
3510
3511 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3512 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3513
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003514- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3515 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3516 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3517 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3518 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003519
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003520- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3521 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3522 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3523
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003524Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003525-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003526
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003527- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3528 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3529 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3530 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3531 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3532 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003533 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3534 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3535 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3536 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003537
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003538- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3539 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3540 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3541
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003542Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003543-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003544
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003545- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3546
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003547Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003548-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003549
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003550- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3551 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3552 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3553 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3554 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3555 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3556
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003557- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3558
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003559- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3560
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003561- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3562
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003563- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3564 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3565 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3566
3567- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3568
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003569Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003570-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003571
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003572- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3573 off a search on Google.
3574
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003575Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003576-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003577
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003578- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3579 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3580 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3581 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3582 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3583 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3584 other platforms should do likewise.
3585
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003586- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3587 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3588 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3589
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003590C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003591-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003592
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003593- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3594 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3595 producing key-value pairs.
3596
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003597- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003598 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003599 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3600 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3601 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3602 previously went unchallenged.
3603
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003604New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003605-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003606
3607Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003608-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003609
3610Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003611-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003612
3613Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003614----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003615
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003616- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3617 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003618
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003619- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3620 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3621 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3622 home.
3623
3624
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003625What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003626===========================
3627
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003628*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3629
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003630Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003631--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003632
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003633- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3634 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003635
3636 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003637 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003638
3639 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3640 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003641 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003642 This needs to be documented.
3643
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003644- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3645 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3646
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003647- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3648 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3649 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3650
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003651- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3652 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3653
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003654- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3655 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3656 class forbids it).
3657
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003658- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3659 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3660 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3661
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003662- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3663
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003664Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003665-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003666
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003667- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3668 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003669 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003670
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003671- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3672 (like 1 + '').
3673
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003674Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003675-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003676
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003677- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3678 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3679 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3680 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003681 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003682 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3683
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003684- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3685 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3686 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3687 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3688
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003689- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3690 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003691 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3692 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3693 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003694
3695- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3696 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003697
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003698- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3699 bytes on its input.
3700
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003701Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003702-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003703
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003704- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003705 convenience function.
3706
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003707- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3708 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3709 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003710 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3711 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3712 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3713 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3714 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3715 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003716
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003717- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3718 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3719 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3720 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3721
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003722- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3723 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3724 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3725
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003726- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3727 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3728 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3729 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3730
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003731- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3732 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003733 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003734 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3735 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3736 new -l and -e options.
3737
3738- statcache is now deprecated.
3739
3740- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3741 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003742 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003743 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3744 time properly taken into account.
3745
3746- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3747 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3748 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3749 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3750
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003751Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003752-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003753
3754Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003755-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003756
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003757- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3758 is built with libdb3 if available.
3759
3760- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3761
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003762C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003763-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003764
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003765- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3766 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3767 PySequence_Size().
3768
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003769- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3770
3771- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3772 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3773 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3774
3775- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3776 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3777
3778- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3779 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3780
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003781New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003782-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003783
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003784- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3785 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3786
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003787- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3788 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3789
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003790- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3791
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003792Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003793-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003794
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003795- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3796 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3797
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003798Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003799-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003800
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003801Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003802----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003803
3804- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3805 removed completely in the next release.
3806
3807- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3808 OSX.
3809
3810- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3811 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3812
3813- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3814
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003815
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003816What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003817===========================
3818
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003819*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3820
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003821Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003822--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003823
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003824- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003825 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003826 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003827 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3828 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003829 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3830 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003831 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3832 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003833
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003834- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3835 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3836
3837- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3838 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3839
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003840Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003841-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003842
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003843- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3844 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3845 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3846 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3847 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3848 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3849 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3850 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3851
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003852- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3853 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3854 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3855 example).
3856
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003857- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003858 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003859 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003860 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003861
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003862- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3863 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3864 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003865 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003866
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003867- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3868 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3869 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3870 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3871 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3872 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3873
3874 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3875
3876 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3877
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003878Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003879-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003880
3881- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3882
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003883- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3884
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003885- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3886 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003887
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003888- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3889 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3890 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3891 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3892 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3893 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003894 attributes.
3895
3896- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3897 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3898 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003899
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003900- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3901 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3902 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003903
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003904- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3905 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3906 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003907 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3908 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3909
3910- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3911 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003912
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003913Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003914-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003915
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003916- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3917 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3918
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003919- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3920 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3921 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3922 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3923
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003924- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3925 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3926 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3927 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3928
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003929 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3930 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3931 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3932 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3933 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3934 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3935 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3936 without losing information).
3937
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003938- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003939 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3940 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3941 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3942 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3943 module).
3944
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003945 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003946 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3947 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3948 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3949 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003950
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003951- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003952 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3953 encoding.
3954
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003955- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3956 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3957
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003958- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003959 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3960
3961- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3962 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3963 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3964 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3965
3966- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3967
3968- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3969 ON, and OFF.
3970
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003971- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3972 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3973
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003974Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003975-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003976
3977- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3978 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3979 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003980
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003981- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3982 been added: -X and -E.
3983
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003984Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003985-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003986
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003987- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3988 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3989
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003990C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003991-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003992
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003993- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3994 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3995 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3996 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3997 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3998
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003999- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4000 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4001 as long) arguments.
4002
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004003- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4004 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4005 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4006 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4007 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4008 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4009
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004010- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4011 input.
4012
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004013New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004014-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004015
4016Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004017-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004018
4019Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004020-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004021
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004022- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4023 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4024 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4025
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004026- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4027 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4028 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004029 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004030
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004031 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4032 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4033 import signal
4034 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004035
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004036 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004037 while 1:
4038 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004039 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004040 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4041 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4042 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4043 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004044
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004045
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004046What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4047===========================
4048
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004049*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4050
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004051Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004052--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004053
4054- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4055 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4056 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4057
4058- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4059 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4060 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4061 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4062 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4063 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4064 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004065
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004066- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004067 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004068 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4069 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4070 associate a docstring with a property.
4071
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004072- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4073 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4074 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4075 other built-in object types.
4076
4077- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4078 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4079 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4080 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4081 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4082
4083- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4084 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4085
4086- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4087 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004088 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004089 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4090 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4091 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4092 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4093 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4094
4095- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4096 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4097 class.
4098
4099- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4100 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4101 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4102 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4103
4104- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4105 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4106 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4107 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4108
4109- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4110 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4111
4112- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4113 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4114 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4115 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4116 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004117 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004118 with the same value as s.
4119
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004120- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4121
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004122Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004123----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004124
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004125- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4126
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004127- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4128 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4129 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4130 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4131 objects.
4132
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004133- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4134 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004135 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4136 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4137
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004138- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4139 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4140 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4141
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004142Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004143-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004144
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004145- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4146 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4147 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4148 by the instances.
4149
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004150- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4151 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4152 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4153
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004154- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4155 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4156 before the entire comparison is complete.
4157
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004158- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4159 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4160 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4161
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004162- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4163 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4164 getwriter().
4165
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004166- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4167 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4168
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004169- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004170 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4171 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4172
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004173- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4174 iterable object.
4175
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004176- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4177 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004178
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004179- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4180 authentication.
4181
4182- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4183 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004184
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004185- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004186 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4187 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4188 a sample driver.)
4189
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004190Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004191-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004192
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004193- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4194 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4195 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4196 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4197 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4198 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4199 kernel has large file support.
4200
4201- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4202 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4203 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4204 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4205 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4206
4207- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4208 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4209 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4210
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004211C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004212-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004213
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004214- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4215 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4216
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004217New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004218-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004219
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004220- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4221 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4222
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004223Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004224-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004225
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004226- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4227 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4228 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4229 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4230 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4231
4232- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4233 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4234 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4235 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4236
4237- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4238 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4239
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004240Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004241-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004242
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004243- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004244 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4245 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004246
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004247
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004248What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4249===========================
4250
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004251*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4252
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004253Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004254----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004255
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004256- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4257 big to represent as a C double.
4258
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004259- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4260 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4261 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4262 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4263 restriction).
4264
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004265- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4266 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4267 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4268 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4269 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4270
4271 >>> dir([])
4272 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4273 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4274 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4275 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4276 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4277 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4278 'reverse', 'sort']
4279
4280 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4281
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004282- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004283 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4284 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4285 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4286 OverflowError exception.
4287
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004288- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004289 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004290 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4291 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4292 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4293 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4294 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004295 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004296 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4297 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4298
4299 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4300 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4301 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4302 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004303
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004304- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004305 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4306 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4307 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4308 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4309 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4310 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4311 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4312 once it is created.
4313
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004314- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4315 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4316 (key, value) pairs.
4317
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004318- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004319 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4320 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4321
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004322- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4323 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4324 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4325 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4326 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004327
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004328- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004329 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4330 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4331
4332 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4333
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004334- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004335 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4336
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004337Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004338-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004339
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004340- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004341 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4342 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004343
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004344- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4345 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4346 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4347 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4348 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4349 in this area anymore).
4350
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004351- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4352 threading.Timer.
4353
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004354- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4355 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4356
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004357- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004358 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4359
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004360- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004361 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4362 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4363 converted to Python longs.
4364
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004365- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004366 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4367
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004368- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4369 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4370 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4371
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004372Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004373-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004374
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004375- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4376 division operators as per PEP 238.
4377
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004378Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004379-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004380
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004381- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4382 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4383 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4384 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4385
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004386C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004387-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004388
4389- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004390
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004391- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4392 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004393 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004394
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004395 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4396 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004397 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004398 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004399
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004400- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004401 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4402 module:
4403
4404 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004405
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004406 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4407 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004408
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004409 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4410 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004411
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004412 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4413
4414 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4415
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004416- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004417 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4418 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4419 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004420
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004421New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004422-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004423
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004424- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4425 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4426 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4427 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4428 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004429
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004430Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004431-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004432
4433Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004434-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004435
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004436- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4437 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4438 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4439 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004440 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4441 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4442 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4443 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4444 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004445
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004446- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004447 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4448
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004449
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004450What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4451===========================
4452
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004453*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4454
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004455Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004456-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004457
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004458- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4459 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4460
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004461- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4462 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4463 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004464
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004465- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4466 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4467 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4468 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004469
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004470- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4471
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004472- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004473
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004474Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004475-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004476
4477- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004478 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004479 the module docstring for details.
4480
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004481Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004482-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004483
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004484- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004485 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4486 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4487 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004488
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004489- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4490 Nick Mathewson.
4491
4492Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004493----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004494
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004495- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4496 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4497 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4498 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4499 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4500 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4501 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4502 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4503
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004504- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4505 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4506 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4507 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4508
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004509- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4510 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4511 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4512 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4513 come a long way).
4514
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004515- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4516 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4517 write filters for these warnings).
4518
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004519- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4520 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4521 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4522 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4523 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4524
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004525- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4526 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4527 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4528 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4529 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4530 older distribution.
4531
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004532Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004533-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004534
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004535- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4536 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004537 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004538
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004539- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4540 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4541 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4542
4543- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4544
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004545- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4546
4547- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4548
4549- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4550
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004551- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004552
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004553- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4554
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004555New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004556-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004557
4558C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004559-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004560
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004561- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4562 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4563 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4564 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4565 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4566 against buffer overruns.
4567
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004568- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004569 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4570 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004571 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4572 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4573 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4574
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004575- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4576 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4577 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4578 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4579 deprecated.
4580
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004581Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004582-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004583
4584- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4585 relevant is found.
4586
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004587
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004588What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004589===========================
4590
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004591*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4592
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004593Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004594----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004595
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004596- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4597 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4598 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4599 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4600 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4601 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4602 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4603 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004604 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004605 repaired.
4606
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004607- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004608 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004609 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4610 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4611 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4612 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4613 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4614 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4615 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4616 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4617
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004618- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4619 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4620 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4621 leading BMO character).
4622
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004623- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4624 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4625 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4626
4627 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4628 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4629 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004630
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004631 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4632 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4633 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4634 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4635 for various simple to use conversions.
4636
4637 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4638 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4639
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004640 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4641 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4642 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4643 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4644 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4645 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4646 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4647 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4648 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4649 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4650 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4651 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4652 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4653 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4654 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004655
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004656- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4657 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4658 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004659 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004660 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004661
4662 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004663 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4664 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4665 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4666 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4667 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004668 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4669 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004670
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004671 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4672 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4673 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004674 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004675
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004676- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4677 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4678 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4679 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4680 floating arithmetic,
4681
4682 x = 9007199254740992.0
4683 print long(x)
4684
4685 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4686 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4687 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4688 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4689 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4690 functions are of good quality).
4691
4692 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4693 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4694 algorithms to break.
4695
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004696- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4697 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4698 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4699 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4700 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4701 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4702 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4703 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4704 order.
4705
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004706- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4707 operation along the most common code paths.
4708
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004709- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4710 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4711
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004712- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4713 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4714 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4715 {}.update(UserDict())
4716
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004717- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4718 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4719 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4720 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4721 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4722 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4723 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4724 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4725
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004726- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004727 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004728
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004729 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004730 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4731 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004732 join() method of strings
4733 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004734 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4735 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004736 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004737 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004738
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004739- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4740 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4741
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004742- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4743 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4744
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004745- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4746 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4747 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4748 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4749
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004750- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4751 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004752 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004753 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4754 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004755
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004756- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4757
4758
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004759Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004760-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004761
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004762- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004763 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004764 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4765 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4766
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004767- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4768 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4769
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004770- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4771 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4772 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4773 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4774
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004775- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4776 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4777 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4778
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004779- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4780
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004781- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4782
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004783- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4784 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4785 that are still imported into string.py).
4786
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004787- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4788
4789- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4790 Now it does.
4791
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004792- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4793
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004794- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4795 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4796 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4797 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4798 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004799 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4800 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004801
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004802- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4803 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4804 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4805 'help(object)'.
4806
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004807Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004808-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004809
4810- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004811 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004812 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4813 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4814
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004815- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004816 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4817 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004818
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004819C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004820-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004821
4822- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4823 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004824
4825----
4826
4827**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**