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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.)
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Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00008=================================
9
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +000010*XXX Release date: DD-MMM-2002 XXX*
11
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000012Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +000013--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +000014
Just van Rossum3eb166b2002-11-29 20:47:40 +000015- Exposed the PyImport_FrozenModules variable in import.c through
16 imp.get_frozenmodules() and imp.set_frozenmodules(). This is
17 useful for freezing tools written in Python that use Python for
Just van Rossum6a8c5182002-12-01 21:43:13 +000018 bootstrapping the frozen application. (XXX: this feature will be
19 backed out if the zipfile import mechanism gets in before 2.3.a1.)
Just van Rossum3eb166b2002-11-29 20:47:40 +000020
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +000021- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
22
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +000023- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
24 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +000025 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +000026 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +000027 a different meaning than before.
28
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +000029- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
30 integer range, so int("4"*1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
31 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000032
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +000033- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +000034 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +000035 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +000036
37- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
38 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
39 and deallocation.
40
41- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
42 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
43
44- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
45 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
46 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
47 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
48 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
49
50- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
51 now detected by the garbage collector.
52
53- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
54 [SF bug 519621]
55
56- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
57 identifier.
58
59- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
60 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
61 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
62 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
63 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
64 [SF bug 563060]
65
66- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
67 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
68 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
69 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
70 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
71
72- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
73 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
74 not called. [SF bug #537450]
75
76- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
77
78- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
79 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
80 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
81 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
82 state of the slots would be lost.)
83
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000084Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +000085-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000086
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +000087- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
88 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
89 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
90
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +000091- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
92 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
93 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
94
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +000095- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
96 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
97 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
98
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +000099- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
100 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
101 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
102 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
103 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
104 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
105 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
106 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
107 releases or implementations.
108
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000109- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000110 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
111 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000112
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000113- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
114 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
115
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000116- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
117 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
118 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
119
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000120- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
121 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
122
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000123- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
124 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000125 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
126 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000127
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000128- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
129 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
130 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
131 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
132 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
133
134 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
135 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
136 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
137 pattern.
138
139 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
140 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
141 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
142 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
143
144 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
145 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
146 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
147 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
148 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
149 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
150
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000151 - The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
152 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
153 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables. In
154 addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
Neal Norwitz7165af22002-09-05 21:42:24 +0000155 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
156 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
157 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
158 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000159
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000160- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
161 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
162 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
163 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
164 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000165 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
166 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
167 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
168 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
169 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
170 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
171 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000172
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000173- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
174 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
175
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000176- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
177 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
178 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
179 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
180 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
181 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
182 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
183 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
184 to Zack Weinberg!
185
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000186- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
187 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
188 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
189 type. This has been fixed now.
190
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000191- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
192 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
193 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
194
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000195- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
196 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
197 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
198 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
199 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
200 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
201 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
202 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000203 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000204
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000205- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
206 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
207 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000208
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000209- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
210 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
211 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
212 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
213 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
214 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
215 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
216 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000217 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000218 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
219 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
220
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000221- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
222 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
223 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
224 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
225 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
226 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
227 this.)
228
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000229- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
230 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000231 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000232 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000233 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
234 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000235 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
236 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000237
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000238- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
239 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
240 currently running.
241
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000242- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
243 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
244 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
245 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
246
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000247- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
248 as directory names.
249
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000250- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
251 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
252
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000253- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
254 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
255
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000256- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000257 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
258 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000259
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000260- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
261 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
262 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
263 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
264 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
265
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000266- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
267 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
268 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
269 removed.
270
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000271- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
272 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
273 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
274
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000275- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
276 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
277 to __debug__.
278
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000279- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
280 string to the left with zeros. For example,
281 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
282
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000283- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
284 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
285 deprecated now.
286
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000287- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
288 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
289 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000290
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000291- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
292 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
293 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
294 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
295 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000296
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000297- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
298 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
299
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000300- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
301 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
302 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000303 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000304 is backward compatible.
305
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000306- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
307 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
308 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
309 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
310 could access a pointer to freed memory.
311
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000312- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
313 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
314 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
315 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
316 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
317 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000318
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000319- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
320 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
321
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000322- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
323 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
324
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000325- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
326 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
327 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
328 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
329 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
330
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000331- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
332 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
333 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
334
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000335- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000336 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
337
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000338- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
339 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
340 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000341
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000342- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
343 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
344
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000345Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000346-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000347
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000348- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
349 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
350 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
351
352 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
353
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000354- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
355 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
356 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000357 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000358
Andrew M. Kuchling50905d02002-11-26 12:31:09 +0000359- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has been
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000360 added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is still
361 available in source code, but not built automatically anymore, and
362 is now named bsddb185.
363
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000364- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
365 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000366
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000367- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
368
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000369- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
370 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
371
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000372- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
373 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
374 supported.
375
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000376- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
377
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000378- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
379 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000380
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000381- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
382 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
383
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000384- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
385
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000386- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
387 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
388
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000389- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
390 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
391 functions but callable type objects.
392
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000393- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000394 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000395 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000396
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +0000397- posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and posix.getpgid have been
398 added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000399
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000400- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
401 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000402
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000403- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
404 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
405 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
406 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
407
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000408- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
409 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000410
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000411- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
412 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
413 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
414 and __imul__.
415
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000416- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000417 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
418 is called.
419
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000420- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
421 been added where available.
422
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000423- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
424 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
425 interpreter was compiled.
426
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000427- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
428 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
429 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000430 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000431 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
432 1, not 2.
433
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000434- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
435 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
436 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
437 limit.
438
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000439- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
440 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
441 bug #623464.
442
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000443Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000444-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000445
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000446- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
447 executed.
448
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +0000449- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
450 postinstallation script.
451
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +0000452- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
453 test the current module.
454
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +0000455- When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
456 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
457 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
458 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
459 this behavior needs to be controlled.
460
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000461- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000462 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000463 Ward's Optik package.
464
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000465- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
466 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
467 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
468 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
469
470- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
471 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000472 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000473
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +0000474- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
475 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
476 shelf are binary pickles.
477
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +0000478- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
479 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
480
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +0000481- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
482 modules are iterators now.
483
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +0000484- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
485 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
486 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
487 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
488 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
489 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000490
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +0000491- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
492 with their entity value.
493
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +0000494- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
495
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000496- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
497 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +0000498
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000499- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
500 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000501 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +0000502
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +0000503- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
504 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
505 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
506 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
507 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
508 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
509 main():
510
511 import locale
512 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
513
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +0000514- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
515 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
516
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +0000517- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
518 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
519 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
520 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
521 to the new standard.
522
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +0000523- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
524 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
525 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
526 an extension to the database.
527
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000528- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
529 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
530 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
531 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +0000532 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000533
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000534- Added operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to a**b.
535
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000536- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000537 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000538
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000539- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
540 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
541 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
542 bounded integers.
543
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +0000544- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
545 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
546 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
547
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +0000548- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
549
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000550- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
551 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
552 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
553 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
554
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +0000555- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
556 argument.
557
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +0000558- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
559 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
560 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
561 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
562 [SF patch 560794].
563
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000564- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
565 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
566 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000567 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
568 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
569 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000570
571- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
572 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +0000573
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +0000574- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
575 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
576 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
577 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +0000578
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +0000579- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
580 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
581 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
582 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
583 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
584
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000585- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +0000586
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +0000587- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
588
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +0000589- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
590 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
591 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
592 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
593 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
594 identical to None.
595
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +0000596- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
597 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
598 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
599 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
600 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
601 results now.
602
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +0000603- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
604 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
605
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000606- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
607 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
608 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
609 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
610 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
611 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
612 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
613 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
614
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +0000615- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
616
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +0000617- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
618 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
619
620- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
621 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
622 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
623 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
624 and other systems.
625
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000626- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
627 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
628 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
629 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 +0000630 work well with these.
631
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +0000632- compileall now supports quiet operation.
633
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000634- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +0000635 connections.
636
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +0000637- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
638 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
639 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
640
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +0000641- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
642 sets
643
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +0000644- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
645 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
646 name.
647
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +0000648- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
649 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
650 passed in.
651
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000652- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +0000653 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +0000654 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
655 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +0000656
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +0000657- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
658
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +0000659- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
660
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +0000661- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
662 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
663 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
664
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000665- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
666 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
667 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
668 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
669 honored.
670
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000671- distutils' build_ext command now links c++ extensions with the c++
672 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
673 running under *nix.
674
675- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
676 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
677 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
678
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +0000679- New pdb command `pp' which is like `p' except that it pretty-prints
680 the value of its expression argument.
681
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000682- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
683 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
684 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
685
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +0000686- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
687 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
688 skipstone browser was included.
689
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +0000690- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
691 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
692
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000693Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000694-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000695
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +0000696- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
697 names in addition to accepting file names.
698
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +0000699- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
700 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
701 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
702 still used and useful.)
703
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +0000704- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
705 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
706 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
707 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +0000708
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +0000709- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
710 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
711 the generated binary.
712
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000713Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000714-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000715
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +0000716- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
717
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000718- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
719 except in the hands of experts.
720
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000721- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000722 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
723 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
724 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +0000725
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +0000726- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
727 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
728 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
729 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
730 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
731 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
732 builds.
733
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000734- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
735 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
736 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
737 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
738 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
739 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
740 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
741 new type.
742
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +0000743- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +0000744
745 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
746 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
747 positive infinities.
748
749 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
750 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
751 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
752 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
753 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
754 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
755 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
756
757 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
758
759 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
760
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +0000761- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
762 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
763 size of the executable.
764
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000765- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
766 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
767 configure script. On other platforms, remove
768 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +0000769
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +0000770- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
771
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +0000772- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
773 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
774 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +0000775
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +0000776- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
777 well as Unix.
778
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +0000779- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
780 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
781 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
782 modules in the README file for details.
783
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000784C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000785-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000786
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000787- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
788 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000789 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +0000790 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000791 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000792
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000793- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
794 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
795 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
796 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
797 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
798 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
799 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
800 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
801 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
802 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
803 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
804 aligned.)
805
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +0000806- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
807 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
808 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
809
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000810- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
811 level.
812
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +0000813- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
814 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
815 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
816 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
817 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
818
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +0000819- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
820 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
821 code.
822
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +0000823- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
824 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
825 adjusting for negative indices.
826
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000827- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
828 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
829 object.
830
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +0000831- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
832 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
833 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
834
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000835- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
836 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +0000837
838- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
839
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +0000840- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
841 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
842 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
843 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
844
845- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
846
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +0000847- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000848
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000849- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +0000850 without going through the buffer API.
851
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000852- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +0000853
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +0000854- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
855 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
856 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
857 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
858
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000859- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
860 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
861
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +0000862- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000863 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
864
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000865New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000866-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000867
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +0000868- OpenVMS is now supported.
869
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +0000870- AtheOS is now supported.
871
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +0000872- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
873
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +0000874- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
875
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000876Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000877-----
878
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +0000879- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
880 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
881 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000882
883Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000884-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000885
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +0000886- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
887 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
888 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
889 bugs.
890 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +0000891 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of
892 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
893 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +0000894 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000895
896- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +0000897 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +0000898
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +0000899- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
900 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
901
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +0000902- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
903 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
904 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
905 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
906
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +0000907- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
908 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
909 use files" uninstall option).
910
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +0000911- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
912
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +0000913- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
914 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
915
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +0000916- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
917 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
918 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
919
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +0000920- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
921 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
922 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
923 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
924 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +0000925 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
926 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
927 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +0000928
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000929- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000930 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000931 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
932 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
933 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
934 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
935 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
936 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
937 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
938 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
939 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
940 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
941 work around.
942
943- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
944 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
945 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
946 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
947 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
948 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
949 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
950 specified with O_CREAT too).
951
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000952Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000953----
954
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +0000955- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000956
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +0000957- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
958 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
959 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
960
961- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
962 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
963 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
964 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
965 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
966 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
967 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
968 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
969
970- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
971 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
972 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
973 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
974 window, but all this can be customized.
975
976- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
977 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
978 releases.
979
980- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
981 line interface too.
982
983- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
984 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
985 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
986 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
987 available for convenience.
988
989- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
990 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
991 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
992
993- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
994 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
995 (also when running on Mac OS X).
996
997- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
998 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
999 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1000 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
1001 Help Viewer comaptible form and installing it.
1002
1003- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1004 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
1005
1006- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1007 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001008
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001009What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001010===============================
1011
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001012*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1013
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001014Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001015--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001016
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001017- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1018 with a custom metaclass.
1019
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001020Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001021-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001022
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001023- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1024 are proxies.
1025
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001026Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001027-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001028
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001029- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1030 very short strings.
1031
1032- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1033 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1034 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1035 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1036 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1037
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001038Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001039-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001040
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001041- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1042 close or delete time).
1043
1044- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1045 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1046
1047- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1048
1049- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001050 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001051
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001052Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001053-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001054
1055Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001056-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001057
1058C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001059-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001060
1061New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001062-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001063
1064Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001065-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001066
1067Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001068-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001069
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001070- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1071
1072- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1073 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1074
1075- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1076 deleted at process exit time.
1077
1078- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1079 in backslash.
1080
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001081Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001082----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001083
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001084- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1085 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1086 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1087
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001088
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001089What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001090===========================
1091
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001092*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1093
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001094Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001095--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001096
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001097- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1098 been extensively updated. See
1099
1100 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1101
1102 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1103
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001104- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1105 deleted!
1106
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001107- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1108 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1109 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1110 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1111 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1112
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001113- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1114
1115 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1116 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1117
1118 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1119 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1120 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1121 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1122 supported anyway.
1123
1124 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1125 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1126
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001127- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1128 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1129 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1130 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1131 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001132
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001133- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1134 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1135 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1136
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001137Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001138-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001139
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001140- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1141 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1142 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1143 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1144 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1145 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001146 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1147 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1148 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1149 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001150
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001151- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1152 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1153 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1154
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001155Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001156-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001157
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001158- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1159
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001160Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001161-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001162
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001163- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1164 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1165 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1166 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1167 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1168 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1169
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001170- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1171
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001172- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1173
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001174- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1175
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001176- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1177 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1178 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1179
1180- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1181
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001182Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001183-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001184
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001185- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1186 off a search on Google.
1187
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001188Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001189-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001190
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001191- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1192 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1193 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1194 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1195 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1196 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1197 other platforms should do likewise.
1198
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001199- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1200 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1201 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1202
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001203C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001204-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001205
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001206- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1207 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1208 producing key-value pairs.
1209
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001210- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001211 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001212 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1213 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1214 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1215 previously went unchallenged.
1216
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001217New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001218-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001219
1220Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001221-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001222
1223Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001224-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001225
1226Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001227----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001228
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001229- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1230 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001231
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001232- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1233 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1234 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1235 home.
1236
1237
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001238What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001239===========================
1240
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001241*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1242
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001243Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001244--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001245
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001246- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1247 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001248
1249 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001250 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001251
1252 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1253 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001254 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001255 This needs to be documented.
1256
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001257- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1258 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1259
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001260- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1261 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1262 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1263
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001264- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1265 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1266
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001267- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1268 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1269 class forbids it).
1270
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001271- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1272 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1273 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1274
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001275- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1276
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001277Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001278-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001279
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001280- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1281 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001282 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001283
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001284- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1285 (like 1 + '').
1286
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001287Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001288-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001289
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001290- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1291 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1292 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1293 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001294 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001295 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1296
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001297- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1298 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1299 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1300 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1301
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001302- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1303 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001304 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1305 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1306 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001307
1308- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1309 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001310
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001311- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1312 bytes on its input.
1313
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001314Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001315-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001316
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001317- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001318 convenience function.
1319
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001320- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1321 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1322 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001323 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1324 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1325 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1326 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1327 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1328 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001329
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001330- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1331 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1332 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1333 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1334
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001335- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1336 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1337 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1338
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001339- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1340 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1341 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1342 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1343
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001344- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1345 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001346 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001347 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1348 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1349 new -l and -e options.
1350
1351- statcache is now deprecated.
1352
1353- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1354 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001355 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001356 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1357 time properly taken into account.
1358
1359- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1360 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1361 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1362 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1363
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001364Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001365-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001366
1367Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001368-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001369
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001370- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1371 is built with libdb3 if available.
1372
1373- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1374
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001375C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001376-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001377
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001378- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1379 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1380 PySequence_Size().
1381
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001382- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1383
1384- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1385 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1386 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1387
1388- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1389 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1390
1391- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1392 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1393
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001394New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001395-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001396
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001397- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1398 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1399
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001400- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1401 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1402
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001403- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1404
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001405Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001406-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001407
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001408- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1409 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1410
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001411Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001412-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001413
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001414Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001415----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001416
1417- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1418 removed completely in the next release.
1419
1420- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1421 OSX.
1422
1423- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1424 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1425
1426- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1427
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001428
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001429What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001430===========================
1431
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001432*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
1433
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001434Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001435--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001436
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001437- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001438 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001439 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001440 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
1441 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001442 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
1443 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001444 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
1445 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00001446
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00001447- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
1448 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
1449
1450- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
1451 class methods, static methods, and properties.
1452
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001453Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001454-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001455
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00001456- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
1457 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
1458 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
1459 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
1460 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
1461 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
1462 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
1463 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
1464
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001465- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
1466 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
1467 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
1468 example).
1469
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001470- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001471 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001472 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001473 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001474
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001475- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
1476 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
1477 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00001478 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001479
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001480- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
1481 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
1482 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
1483 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
1484 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
1485 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
1486
1487 isinstance(x, (A, B))
1488
1489 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
1490
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001491Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001492-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001493
1494- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
1495
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001496- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
1497
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001498- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
1499 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00001500
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001501- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
1502 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
1503 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
1504 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
1505 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
1506 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00001507 attributes.
1508
1509- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
1510 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
1511 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00001512
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001513- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
1514 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
1515 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001516
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001517- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
1518 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
1519 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001520 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
1521 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
1522
1523- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
1524 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001525
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001526Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001527-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001528
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00001529- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
1530 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
1531
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001532- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
1533 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
1534 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
1535 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
1536
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00001537- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
1538 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
1539 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
1540 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
1541
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00001542 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
1543 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
1544 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
1545 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
1546 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
1547 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
1548 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
1549 without losing information).
1550
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001551- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00001552 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
1553 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
1554 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
1555 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
1556 module).
1557
1558 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
1559 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
1560 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
1561 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
1562 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001563
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001564- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00001565 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
1566 encoding.
1567
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00001568- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
1569 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
1570
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001571- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001572 to allow saving the message body to a file.
1573
1574- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
1575 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
1576 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
1577 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
1578
1579- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
1580
1581- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
1582 ON, and OFF.
1583
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001584- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
1585 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
1586
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001587Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001588-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001589
1590- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
1591 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
1592 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001593
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001594- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
1595 been added: -X and -E.
1596
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001597Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001598-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001599
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001600- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
1601 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
1602
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001603C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001604-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001605
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00001606- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
1607 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
1608 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
1609 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
1610 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
1611
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00001612- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
1613 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
1614 as long) arguments.
1615
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001616- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
1617 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
1618 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
1619 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
1620 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
1621 report any bugs or strange behavior).
1622
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001623- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
1624 input.
1625
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001626New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001627-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001628
1629Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001630-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001631
1632Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001633-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001634
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00001635- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
1636 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
1637 is created for .py and .pyw files.
1638
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001639- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
1640 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
1641 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001642 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001643
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001644 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
1645 # (SIGINT) behavior.
1646 import signal
1647 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001648
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001649 try:
1650 while 1:
1651 pass
1652 except KeyboardInterrupt:
1653 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
1654 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
1655 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
1656 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001657
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001658
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001659What's New in Python 2.2a4?
1660===========================
1661
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001662*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
1663
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001664Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001665--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001666
1667- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
1668 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
1669 documentation for all operations on list objects.
1670
1671- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
1672 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
1673 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
1674 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
1675 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
1676 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
1677 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001678
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001679- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001680 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001681 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
1682 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
1683 associate a docstring with a property.
1684
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001685- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
1686 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
1687 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
1688 other built-in object types.
1689
1690- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
1691 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
1692 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
1693 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
1694 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
1695
1696- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
1697 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
1698
1699- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
1700 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001701 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001702 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
1703 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
1704 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
1705 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
1706 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
1707
1708- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
1709 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
1710 class.
1711
1712- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
1713 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
1714 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
1715 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
1716
1717- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
1718 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
1719 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
1720 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
1721
1722- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
1723 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
1724
1725- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
1726 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
1727 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
1728 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
1729 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001730 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001731 with the same value as s.
1732
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00001733- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
1734
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001735Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001736----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001737
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00001738- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
1739
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00001740- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
1741 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
1742 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
1743 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
1744 objects.
1745
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001746- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
1747 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00001748 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
1749 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
1750
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001751- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
1752 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
1753 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
1754
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001755Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001756-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001757
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00001758- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1759 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
1760 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
1761 by the instances.
1762
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00001763- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
1764 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
1765 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
1766
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001767- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
1768 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
1769 before the entire comparison is complete.
1770
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00001771- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1772 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
1773 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
1774
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00001775- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
1776 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
1777 getwriter().
1778
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001779- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
1780 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
1781
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00001782- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001783 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
1784 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
1785
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00001786- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
1787 iterable object.
1788
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001789- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
1790 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001791
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001792- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
1793 authentication.
1794
1795- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
1796 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001797
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001798- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00001799 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
1800 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
1801 a sample driver.)
1802
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00001803Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001804-----
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001805
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001806Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001807-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001808
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001809- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
1810 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
1811 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
1812 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
1813 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
1814 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
1815 kernel has large file support.
1816
1817- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
1818 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
1819 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
1820 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
1821 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
1822
1823- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
1824 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
1825 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
1826
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001827C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001828-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001829
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001830- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
1831 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
1832
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001833New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001834-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001835
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001836- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
1837 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
1838
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001839Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001840-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001841
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001842- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
1843 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
1844 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
1845 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
1846 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
1847
1848- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
1849 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
1850 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
1851 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
1852
1853- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
1854 especially in regard to reporting errors.
1855
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001856Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001857-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001858
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001859- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001860 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
1861 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001862
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001863
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001864What's New in Python 2.2a3?
1865===========================
1866
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001867*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
1868
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001869Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001870----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001871
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001872- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
1873 big to represent as a C double.
1874
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00001875- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
1876 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
1877 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
1878 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
1879 restriction).
1880
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00001881- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
1882 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
1883 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
1884 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
1885 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
1886
1887 >>> dir([])
1888 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
1889 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
1890 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
1891 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
1892 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
1893 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
1894 'reverse', 'sort']
1895
1896 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
1897
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001898- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001899 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
1900 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
1901 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
1902 OverflowError exception.
1903
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00001904- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001905 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001906 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
1907 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
1908 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
1909 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
1910 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001911 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001912 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
1913 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
1914
1915 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
1916 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
1917 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
1918 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001919
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001920- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001921 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
1922 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
1923 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
1924 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
1925 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
1926 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
1927 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
1928 once it is created.
1929
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00001930- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
1931 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
1932 (key, value) pairs.
1933
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001934- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001935 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
1936 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
1937
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00001938- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
1939 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
1940 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
1941 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
1942 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001943
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001944- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001945 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
1946 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
1947
1948 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
1949
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001950- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00001951 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
1952
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001953Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001954-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001955
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00001956- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00001957 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
1958 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00001959
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00001960- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
1961 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
1962 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
1963 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
1964 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
1965 in this area anymore).
1966
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00001967- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
1968 threading.Timer.
1969
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00001970- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
1971 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
1972
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001973- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001974 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
1975
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001976- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00001977 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
1978 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
1979 converted to Python longs.
1980
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001981- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001982 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
1983
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00001984- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
1985 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
1986 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
1987
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001988Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001989-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001990
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001991- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
1992 division operators as per PEP 238.
1993
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001994Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001995-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001996
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001997- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
1998 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
1999 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2000 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2001
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002002C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002003-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002004
2005- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002006
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002007- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2008 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002009 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002010
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002011 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2012 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
2013 /* The conversion failed. */
2014 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002015
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002016- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002017 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2018 module:
2019
2020 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002021
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002022 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2023 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002024
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002025 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2026 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002027
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002028 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2029
2030 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2031
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002032- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002033 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2034 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2035 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002036
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002037New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002038-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002039
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002040- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2041 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2042 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2043 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2044 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002045
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002046Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002047-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002048
2049Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002050-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002051
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002052- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2053 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2054 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2055 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002056 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2057 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2058 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2059 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2060 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002061
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002062- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002063 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2064
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002065
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002066What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2067===========================
2068
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002069*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2070
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002071Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002072-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002073
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002074- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2075 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2076
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002077- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2078 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2079 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002080
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002081- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2082 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2083 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2084 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002085
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002086- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2087
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002088- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002089
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002090Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002091-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002092
2093- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002094 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002095 the module docstring for details.
2096
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002097Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002098-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002099
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002100- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002101 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2102 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2103 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002104
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002105- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2106 Nick Mathewson.
2107
2108Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002109----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002110
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002111- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2112 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2113 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2114 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2115 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2116 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2117 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2118 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2119
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002120- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2121 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2122 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2123 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2124
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002125- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2126 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2127 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2128 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2129 come a long way).
2130
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002131- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2132 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2133 write filters for these warnings).
2134
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002135- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2136 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2137 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2138 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2139 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2140
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002141- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2142 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2143 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2144 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2145 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2146 older distribution.
2147
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002148Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002149-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002150
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002151- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2152 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002153 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002154
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002155- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2156 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2157 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2158
2159- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2160
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002161- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2162
2163- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2164
2165- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2166
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002167- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002168
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002169- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2170
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002171New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002172-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002173
2174C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002175-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002176
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002177- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2178 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2179 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2180 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2181 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2182 against buffer overruns.
2183
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002184- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002185 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2186 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002187 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2188 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2189 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2190
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002191- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2192 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2193 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2194 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2195 deprecated.
2196
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002197Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002198-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002199
2200- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2201 relevant is found.
2202
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002203
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002204What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002205===========================
2206
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002207*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2208
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002209Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002210----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002211
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002212- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2213 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2214 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2215 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2216 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2217 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2218 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2219 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002220 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002221 repaired.
2222
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002223- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002224 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002225 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2226 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2227 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2228 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2229 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2230 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2231 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2232 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2233
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002234- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2235 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2236 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2237 leading BMO character).
2238
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002239- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2240 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2241 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2242
2243 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2244 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2245 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002246
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002247 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2248 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2249 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2250 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2251 for various simple to use conversions.
2252
2253 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2254 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2255
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002256 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2257 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2258 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2259 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2260 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2261 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2262 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2263 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2264 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2265 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2266 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2267 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2268 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2269 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2270 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002271
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002272- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2273 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2274 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002275 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002276 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002277
2278 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002279 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2280 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2281 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2282 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2283 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002284 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2285 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002286
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002287 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2288 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2289 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002290 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002291
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002292- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2293 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2294 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2295 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2296 floating arithmetic,
2297
2298 x = 9007199254740992.0
2299 print long(x)
2300
2301 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2302 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2303 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2304 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2305 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2306 functions are of good quality).
2307
2308 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2309 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2310 algorithms to break.
2311
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002312- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2313 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2314 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2315 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2316 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2317 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2318 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2319 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2320 order.
2321
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002322- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2323 operation along the most common code paths.
2324
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002325- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2326 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2327
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002328- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2329 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2330 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2331 {}.update(UserDict())
2332
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002333- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2334 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2335 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2336 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2337 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2338 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2339 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2340 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2341
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002342- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002343 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002344
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002345 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002346 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2347 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002348 join() method of strings
2349 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002350 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2351 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002352 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002353 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002354
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002355- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2356 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2357
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002358- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2359 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2360
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002361- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2362 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2363 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2364 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2365
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002366- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2367 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002368 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002369 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2370 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002371
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002372- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2373
2374
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002375Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002376-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002377
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002378- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002379 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002380 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2381 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2382
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002383- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2384 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2385
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002386- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2387 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2388 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2389 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2390
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002391- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2392 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2393 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2394
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002395- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2396
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002397- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2398
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002399- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2400 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2401 that are still imported into string.py).
2402
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002403- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2404
2405- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2406 Now it does.
2407
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002408- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2409
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002410- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2411 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2412 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2413 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2414 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002415 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2416 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002417
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002418- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2419 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2420 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2421 'help(object)'.
2422
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002423Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002424-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002425
2426- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002427 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002428 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
2429 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
2430
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002431- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002432 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
2433 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002434
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002435C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002436-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002437
2438- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
2439 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002440
2441----
2442
2443**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**