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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +000015- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
16 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
17 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
18 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
19 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
20 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
21 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
22 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +000023 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
24 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
25 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
26 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
27 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +000028
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +000029- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
30 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
31 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
32 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
33 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
34
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +000035- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
36
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +000037- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
38 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
39
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +000040- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
41 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
42 modified the list.
43
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +000044- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
45 functions is now writable.
46
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +000047- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
48 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
49 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
50 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
51
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000052- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
53 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
54 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
55 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
56 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000057
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +000058- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
59 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
60
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000061Extension modules
62-----------------
63
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +000064- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
65
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +000066- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
67 data.
68
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +000069- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
70 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
71 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
72 supposed to have been truncated away.
73
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +000074- Added socket.socketpair().
75
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +000076- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
77 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
78
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000079Library
80-------
81
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +000082- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
83 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
84
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +000085- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
86 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
87
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +000088- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
89
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +000090- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
91 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +000092
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +000093- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
94 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
95
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +000096- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
97
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +000098- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
99
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000100- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
101
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000102- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
103 Percivall.
104
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000105- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
106 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
107
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000108- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
109 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
110 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000111 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000112
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000113- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
114 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
115 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
116 and exponent.
117
118- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
119
120- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
121 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
122 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
123
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000124- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
125 to the readline module.
126
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000127- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000128 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
129 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000130
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000131- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
132 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
133 contains symlinks.
134
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000135- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
136 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
137
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000138- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
139 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
140 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
141
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000142- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
143 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
144 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
145 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
146 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
147 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
148 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
149 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
150 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
151 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
152 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
153 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
154 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
155
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000156- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
157
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000158Tools/Demos
159-----------
160
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000161- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
162 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
163
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000164- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
165
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000166Build
167-----
168
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000169- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
170 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
171 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
172 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
173 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
174 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
175 plans to do so.
176
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000177- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
178 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
179
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000180- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
181 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
182
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000183- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
184 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
185
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000186- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
187 GNU/k*BSD systems.
188
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000189- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
190 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
191
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000192C API
193-----
194
195Documentation
196-------------
197
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000198- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
199 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
200
201- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
202 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
203 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000204
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000205New platforms
206-------------
207
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000208- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
209
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000210Tests
211-----
212
213Windows
214-------
215
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000216- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
217 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
218 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
219 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
220 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
221 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
222 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
223 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
224 the problem.
225
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000226Mac
227---
228
229
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000230What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
231=================================
232
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000233*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000234
235Core and builtins
236-----------------
237
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000238- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
239 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
240 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
241 sensitive code.
242
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000243- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
244 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
245 @staticmethod
246 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000247 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000248
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000249- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
250 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
251 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
252 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
253 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
254 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
255 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
256 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
257 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
258 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
259 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
260
261 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
262 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
263 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
264 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
265 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
266 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
267 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
268
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000269- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
270 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
271
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000272- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000273 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000274
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000275- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000276 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000277 which was missing for no apparent reason.
278
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000279- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000280 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
281 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
282
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000283- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
284 types that support garbage collection.
285
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000286- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
287
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000288- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
289 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
290 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
291 Jython.
292
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000293- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
294
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000295- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
296 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
297
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000298- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
299 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
300 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000301
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000302- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
303 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
304 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
305
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000306Extension modules
307-----------------
308
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000309- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
310
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000311Library
312-------
313
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000314- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
315 TIS-620
316
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000317- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
318 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
319 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
320 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
321 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
322 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
323 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
324 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
325 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
326 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
327
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000328- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
329
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000330- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
331 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
332 same as when the argument is omitted).
333 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
334
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000335- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
336
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000337- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
338 schemes are offered.
339
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000340- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
341
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000342- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
343 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
344 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
345
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000346- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
347
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000348- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
349 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
350
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000351- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
352 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
353 when dummy_threading is being used.
354
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000355- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
356 from a tarfile.
357
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000358- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000359 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000360
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000361- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
362 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
363 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
364 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
365
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000366- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
367 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
368
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000369- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
370 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
371 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
372 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
373 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
374 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
375 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
376 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
377 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
378 by some other method in progress).
379
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000380- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
381 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
382 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000383
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000384- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
385
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000386- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
387 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
388 AM Kuchling.
389
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000390- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
391 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
392 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
393
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000394- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
395 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
396 instead of unsigned.
397
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000398- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000399 no longer part of the public API.
400
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000401- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
402 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
403 string methods of the same name).
404
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000405- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000406 SF patch 945642.
407
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000408- doctest unittest integration improvements:
409
410 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
411
412 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
413 DocTestSuites.
414
415- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
416 that provide thread-local data.
417
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000418- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
419 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
420
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000421- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
422
423- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
424 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
425 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
426
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000427- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
428
429 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
430 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
431 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000432
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000433 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
434 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
435 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
436 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
437
438 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
439 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
440
441 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
442 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
443 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
444 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
445
446 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
447 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
448 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
449 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
450 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
451
452 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
453 wrapping help output.
454
455 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
456 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
457 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000458
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000459C API
460-----
461
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000462- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
463 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
464 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
465 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
466 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
467 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
468 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
469 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
470 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
471 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
472 its visible semantics have not changed.
473
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000474- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
475 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
476
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000477Documentation
478-------------
479
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000480- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000481
482 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000483 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000484
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000485 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000486
487 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
488
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000489- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000490
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000491Tests
492-----
493
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000494- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000495 platforms that use the Makefile.
496
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000497- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
498 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
499 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
500
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000501
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000502What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
503=================================
504
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000505*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000506
507Core and builtins
508-----------------
509
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000510- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
511 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
512 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
513 objects now (one object instead of three).
514
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000515- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
516 Windows DLLs.
517
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000518- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
519 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000520
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000521- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
522 a new .pyc magic.
523
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000524- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
525 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
526 be there.
527
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000528- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
529 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
530 the LC_NUMERIC category.
531
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000532- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
533 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
534 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
535
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000536- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
537
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000538- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
539 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
540 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000541
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000542- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
543 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
544
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000545- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
546
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000547- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000548 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000549
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000550- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
551
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000552- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
553
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000554- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
555 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
556
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000557- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
558 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
559 Fixes bug #858016 .
560
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000561- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
562 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
563 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
564
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000565- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
566 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
567 improves their performance (about 35%).
568
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000569- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
570 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
571 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
572
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000573- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
574 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
575 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
576 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
577
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000578- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
579 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
580 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
581 length is not known).
582
583- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
584 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000585 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
586 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000587 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
588
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000589- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
590 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
591
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000592- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
593 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
594 keyword arguments.
595
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000596- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
597 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
598 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
599
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000600- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
601 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
602 cases.
603
604- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
605 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
606 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
607 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
608 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
609 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
610 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
611 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
612 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
613 a release build.
614
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000615- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
616 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
617
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000618- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000619 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000620
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000621- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
622 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
623 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
624 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
625 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
626 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
627 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
628 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
629 destroyed.
630
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000631- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
632 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
633 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
634 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
635 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
636 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
637 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
638 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
639
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000640- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
641 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
642 character other than a space.
643
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000644- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
645 by the function object or by the method object, the function
646 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
647 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
648 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
649 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
650 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
651 attributes with the same name.
652
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000653- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
654 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
655 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
656 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
657 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
658 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
659 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
660 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
661 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
662 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
663 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
664 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
665 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
666 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000667
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000668- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
669 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
670 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
671 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
672 This has been repaired.
673
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000674- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
675
676- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
677
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000678- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
679 over a sequence.
680
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000681- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000682 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000683
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000684- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
685
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000686- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
687 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
688 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
689 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
690 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
691 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
692 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
693 records with equal keys is unchanged).
694
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000695- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
696 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
697 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
698
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000699- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
700 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
701 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
702 freelist.
703
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000704- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
705 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
706
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000707- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
708 number.
709
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000710- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
711 a TypeError exception.
712
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000713- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
714 820195.
715
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000716- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
717 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
718 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
719
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000720- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000721 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
722 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000723
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000724- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
725 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
726 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
727
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000728- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
729 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000730 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000731
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000732- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000733 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
734 the first call.
735
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000736
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000737Extension modules
738-----------------
739
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000740- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
741 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
742
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000743- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
744 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
745 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
746 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
747 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
748 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
749 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000750
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000751- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
752
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000753- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
754
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000755- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
756 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
757
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000758- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
759 fewer false positives.
760
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000761- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
762 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
763
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000764- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000765 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
766
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000767- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000768 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000769 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +0000770 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
771 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000772
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000773- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
774 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
775 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
776 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
777
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000778- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
779 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
780 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
781 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
782 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
783 #897625.
784
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000785- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
786 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
787
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000788- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
789 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
790 and pops on either side of the deque.
791
792- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
793 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
794
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000795- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
796 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
797 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
798 other functions that expect a function argument.
799
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000800- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
801
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000802- os.getsid was added.
803
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000804- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
805 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
806 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
807
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000808- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
809
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000810- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
811
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000812- readline.clear_history was added.
813
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000814- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
815
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000816- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
817
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000818- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
819
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000820- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
821
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000822- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
823
824- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
825
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000826- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
827
828- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
829
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000830- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
831 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
832 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
833
834- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
835 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
836 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
837 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
838 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
839 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
840 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
841
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000842- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
843 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
844 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
845 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000846
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000847- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000848 iterators from a single iterable.
849
850- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
851 of raising a TypeError exception.
852
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000853- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
854 as parameter.
855
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000856Library
857-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000858
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000859- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
860 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
861 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000862
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000863- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
864 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
865 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000866
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000867- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000868
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000869- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
870 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000871
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000872- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
873 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
874
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000875- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
876
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000877- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000878 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000879
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000880- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
881 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
882
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000883- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
884
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000885- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
886 on cygwin and mingw32.
887
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000888- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
889
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000890- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
891 module.
892
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000893- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
894 installation scheme for all platforms.
895
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000896- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000897 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000898
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000899- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
900 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
901 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
902
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000903- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
904 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
905 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
906
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000907- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
908
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000909- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
910
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000911- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
912 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
913
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000914- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
915 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
916 type pattern with the same value exists.
917
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000918- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
919 when run from the command prompt).
920
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000921- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
922 not taken into consideration when caching value.
923
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000924- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
925 default sort).
926
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000927- Added global runctx function to profile module
928
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000929- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
930
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000931- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
932
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000933- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
934
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000935- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000936 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
937 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
938 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
939 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
940 accordingly.
941
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000942- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
943 decoding standards.
944
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000945- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
946 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
947 called for all requests.
948
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000949- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
950 they are passed to the compiler.
951
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000952- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
953 indent, width and depth.
954
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000955- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
956 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
957
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000958- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
959 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
960
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000961- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
962
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000963- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
964
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000965- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
966
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000967- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
968 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
969
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000970- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000971 for better performance.
972
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000973- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000974
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000975- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
976 a string).
977
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000978- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
979
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000980- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
981
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000982- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
983
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000984- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
985
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000986- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
987 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
988 list of fieldnames.
989
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000990- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
991 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
992
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000993- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
994
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000995- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
996 empty lists.
997
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000998- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
999 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1000 and shelves.
1001
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001002- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1003 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1004
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001005- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001006 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1007 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001008
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001009- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1010 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001011 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001012
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001013- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001014 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1015 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1016
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001017- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1018 and removed in Py2.4.
1019
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001020- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1021
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001022- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1023
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001024Tools/Demos
1025-----------
1026
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001027- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1028 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1029
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001030- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1031
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001032- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1033 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1034 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1035 destination in situations where both files are given.
1036
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001037- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1038 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1039 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1040 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1041
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001042- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1043
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001044- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1045 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1046 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1047 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1048 now.
1049
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001050- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1051 in effect
1052
1053- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1054 C-c C-h
1055
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001056- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1057 -d option was given.
1058
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001059Build
1060-----
1061
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001062- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1063 build under OS X.
1064
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001065- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1066 --enable-profiling.
1067
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001068- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1069 is configured --with-tsc.
1070
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001071- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1072 on AMD64.
1073
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001074- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1075 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1076
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001077- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1078 removed.
1079
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001080- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1081 supported (see PEP 11).
1082
1083- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1084
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001085- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1086
1087- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1088 (see PEP 11).
1089
1090- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1091 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1092
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001093C API
1094-----
1095
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001096- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1097 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1098 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1099
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001100- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1101 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1102 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1103 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1104
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001105- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1106 generator objects.
1107
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001108- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1109 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001110 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1111 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001112
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001113- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1114 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1115
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001116- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1117 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1118 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1119 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1120 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1121
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001122- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1123 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1124 about 10% faster.
1125
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001126- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1127 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1128
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001129- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1130 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1131 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1132 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1133
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001134Windows
1135-------
1136
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001137- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1138 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1139 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1140 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1141
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001142- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1143 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1144 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1145
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001146
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001147What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1148===============================
1149
1150*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1151
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001152IDLE
1153----
1154
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001155- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1156 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1157 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1158 context-menu actions.
1159
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001160- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1161 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1162 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1163 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1164 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1165 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1166 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1167 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1168 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1169
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001170
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001171What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1172=============================================
1173
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001174*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001175
1176Core and builtins
1177-----------------
1178
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001179- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001180 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001181 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1182
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001183Extension modules
1184-----------------
1185
1186- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1187 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1188 than once. This has been fixed.
1189
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001190- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1191 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1192 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1193 call.
1194
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001195- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1196
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001197Library
1198-------
1199
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001200- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1201 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1202
1203- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1204 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1205 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1206 restored.
1207
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001208IDLE
1209----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001210
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001211- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001212
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001213Build
1214-----
1215
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001216- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1217 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1218
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001219C API
1220-----
1221
1222Windows
1223-------
1224
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001225- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1226 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1227
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001228- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1229
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001230Mac
1231---
1232
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001233- Various fixes to pimp.
1234
1235- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1236
1237- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1238 more problems than it solves.
1239
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001240
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001241What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1242=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001243
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001244*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1245
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001246Core and builtins
1247-----------------
1248
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001249- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1250 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1251
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001252- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1253 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001254 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001255
1256- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1257 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1258 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001259 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001260
1261- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1262 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001263
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001264- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1265 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1266 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1267
1268- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001269 770247.
1270
1271- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001272
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001273Extension modules
1274-----------------
1275
1276- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1277 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1278
1279- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1280
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001281- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1282
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001283- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1284 contained within the _strptime module.
1285
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001286- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1287 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1288
1289- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001290 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1291
1292- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1293 the find_class attribute, if present.
1294
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001295- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001296
1297 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1298 (SF bug 763298).
1299
1300 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001301 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1302 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1303 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001304
1305 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1306
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001307Library
1308-------
1309
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001310- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1311
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001312- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1313 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1314 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1315 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1316 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1317 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1318 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1319 or Tester().
1320
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001321- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1322 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1323 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1324 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1325 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1326 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1327 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1328 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1329 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001330
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001331 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001332
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001333- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1334 weren't before was an oversight.
1335
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001336- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1337 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1338
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001339- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1340 when there are no lines.
1341
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001342- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1343 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1344
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001345- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1346 to child processes.
1347
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001348- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1349
1350- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1351
1352- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1353 xmlrpclib.
1354
1355- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1356 responses.
1357
1358- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1359 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1360
1361- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1362 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1363 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1364
1365- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1366 used as patterns.
1367
1368- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1369 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1370 than Tk 8.3.
1371
1372- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1373
1374- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001375
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001376Tools/Demos
1377-----------
1378
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001379- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1380
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001381- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1382
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001383- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001384
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001385Build
1386-----
1387
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001388- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1389
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001390- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1391
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001392- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1393 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001394
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001395- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1396 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1397 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001398
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001399C API
1400-----
1401
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001402- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1403 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1404
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001405Windows
1406-------
1407
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001408- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1409 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1410 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1411 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1412 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1413 Python exception ::
1414
1415 thread.error: can't start new thread
1416
1417 is raised now.
1418
1419- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1420 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1421 instead of from DLL teardown.
1422
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001423Mac
1424---
1425
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001426- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001427 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001428 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1429 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1430 the executable in the bundle.
1431
1432- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001433
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001434- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1435
1436- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1437 on Panther.
1438
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001439What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1440================================
1441
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001442*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001443
1444Core and builtins
1445-----------------
1446
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001447- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1448 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1449 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1450 with the -i option.
1451
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001452- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1453 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1454
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001455- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1456 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1457
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001458- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1459 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1460 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1461 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1462 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1463 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1464 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1465 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1466 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1467 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1468 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1469 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1470 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001471
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001472- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1473 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1474 embedded in a lambda expression.
1475
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001476- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1477 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1478 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1479 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1480 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1481
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001482- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1483 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1484 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1485
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001486- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1487 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1488
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001489- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1490 It's writable again.
1491
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001492- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1493 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1494 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001495 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001496
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001497- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1498 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1499 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1500
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001501Extension modules
1502-----------------
1503
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001504- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1505 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1506
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001507- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1508 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1509 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1510 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1511
1512- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1513 collection.
1514
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001515- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1516 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1517 unique within a single program run.
1518
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001519- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1520 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1521
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001522- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1523 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1524
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001525- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1526 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001527
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001528- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1529
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001530- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1531 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1532
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001533- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1534 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1535 for many BSD-derived systems.
1536
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001537
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001538Library
1539-------
1540
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001541- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1542 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1543 primary ones:
1544
1545 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1546 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1547 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1548
1549 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1550 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1551 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1552 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1553 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1554 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1555
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001556- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1557 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1558 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1559 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1560 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1561 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1562 argument.
1563
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001564- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1565 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1566 in the archive.
1567
1568- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1569 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1570
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001571- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1572 569574).
1573
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001574- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1575 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1576 no more.
1577
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001578- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1579 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1580 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1581 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1582 code coverage.
1583
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001584- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1585 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1586 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001587 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1588 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001589
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001590- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1591 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1592 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001593 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001594
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001595- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1596
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001597- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1598 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1599 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1600 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1601
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001602- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1603 handling.
1604
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001605- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1606 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1607
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001608- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1609 in socket.py.
1610
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001611- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1612
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001613- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1614 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1615 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1616 opener with proxy support.
1617
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001618- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1619
1620- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1621
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001622Tools/Demos
1623-----------
1624
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001625- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1626
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001627- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1628
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001629- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1630 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001631
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001632- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1633 files.
1634
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001635Build
1636-----
1637
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001638- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001639 different root directory.
1640
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001641C API
1642-----
1643
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001644- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1645 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1646 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1647 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1648 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1649 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1650 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1651 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1652 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1653 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1654
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001655- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1656 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1657 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1658 from Python.
1659
1660
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001661New platforms
1662-------------
1663
1664None this time.
1665
1666Tests
1667-----
1668
1669- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1670 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1671
1672Windows
1673-------
1674
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001675- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1676
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001677- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1678 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1679 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1680 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1681 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1682 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1683 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1684 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1685 that's what it's for.
1686
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001687Mac
1688---
1689
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001690- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1691 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1692 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1693 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001694- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1695 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1696- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001697
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001698SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1699------------------------------------
1700
1701430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1702598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1703622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1704661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1705683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1706697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1707713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1708724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1709727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1710729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1711730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1712731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1713732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1714733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1715735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1716740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1717744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1718745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1719747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1720749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1721751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1722753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1723755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1724757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1725760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1726
1727
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001728What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1729================================
1730
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001731*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001732
1733Core and builtins
1734-----------------
1735
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001736- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1737 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1738
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001739- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1740 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1741 and cannot be strings).
1742
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001743- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1744 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1745 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1746 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1747
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001748- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1749 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1750 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1751 Python itself.
1752
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001753- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1754 the referenced object, if it has one.
1755
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001756- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1757 the thread started at
1758 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1759
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001760- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1761 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1762 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1763 placed on a list index.
1764
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001765- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1766 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1767 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1768 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1769
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001770- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1771 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1772 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1773 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1774 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1775 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1776 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1777
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001778- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1779 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1780 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1781 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1782 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1783
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001784- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1785 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001786
1787- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1788 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1789 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1790 #693195.)
1791
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001792- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1793 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001794
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001795- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001796 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001797 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1798 interpreter executions, would fail.
1799
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001800- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001801 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001802 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001803
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001804Extension modules
1805-----------------
1806
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001807- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1808 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1809 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1810 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1811
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001812- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1813 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1814
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001815- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1816 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1817 and Greg Chapman.)
1818
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001819- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1820 recursively.
1821
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001822- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001823 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1824 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1825 leaks.
1826
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001827- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1828
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001829- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1830 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1831 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1832 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1833 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1834 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1835 #705836.
1836
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001837- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001838 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1839
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001840- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1841 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1842 See SF bug #692416.
1843
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001844- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1845 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1846
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001847- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1848 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1849 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001850
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001851- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001852 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1853 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1854
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001855- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1856 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1857 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1858 timeouts to work properly.
1859
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001860Library
1861-------
1862
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001863- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1864 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1865 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1866 future release.
1867
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001868- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1869 for querying platform dependent features.
1870
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001871- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001872
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001873- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1874 pickle protocol versions.
1875
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001876- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1877 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1878 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1879
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001880- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1881
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001882- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1883 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1884 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1885 modules.
1886
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001887- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1888 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1889 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1890
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001891- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1892 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1893
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001894- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1895 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1896 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1897
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001898- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001899 MS Office extensions.
1900
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001901- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1902 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1903
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001904- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1905 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1906
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001907- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1908 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1909 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1910 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1911 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1912 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1913
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001914- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1915 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1916 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001917
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001918- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1919 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1920 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1921
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001922- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1923
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001924- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1925 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1926 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1927
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001928Tools/Demos
1929-----------
1930
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001931- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1932 See the module docstring for details.
1933
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001934Build
1935-----
1936
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001937- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1938 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001939
1940C API
1941-----
1942
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001943- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1944
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001945- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1946 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1947 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1948
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001949- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1950 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001951
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001952 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1953 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1954 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001955
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001956- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001957 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1958
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001959- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1960 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1961 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001962
1963New platforms
1964-------------
1965
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001966None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001967
1968Tests
1969-----
1970
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001971- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1972 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001973
1974Windows
1975-------
1976
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001977- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1978 function.
1979
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001980- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1981 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001982
1983Mac
1984---
1985
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001986- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1987 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001988
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001989- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1990 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001991
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001992- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1993 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1994 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001995
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001996- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001997 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1998 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001999
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002000- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2001 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002002
2003
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002004What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2005=================================
2006
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002007*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002008
2009Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002010-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002011
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002012- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2013 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2014 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2015
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002016- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2017 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2018 (SF patch #664376.)
2019
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002020- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2021 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2022 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2023 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2024 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2025 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002026 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002027
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002028- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2029 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2030 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2031 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002032 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002033
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002034- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2035 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2036 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2037 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2038 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2039 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2040 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2041 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2042 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2043 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2044 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2045
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002046- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2047 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2048 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2049 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2050 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2051 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2052
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002053- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2054 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2055
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002056- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2057 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2058 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2059 case.)
2060
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002061- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2062 passed as unicode strings.
2063
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002064- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2065 See SF bug #683467.
2066
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002067- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2068 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2069
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002070- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2071
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002072- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2073
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002074- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2075 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2076 arguments.
2077
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002078- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2079 See SF bug #667147.
2080
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002081- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002082 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002083 See SF bug #676155.
2084
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002085- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002086 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002087 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2088 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2089 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2090 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2091 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2092 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002093
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002094Extension modules
2095-----------------
2096
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002097- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2098 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2099 tp_as_number pointer.
2100
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002101- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2102 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2103 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2104 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2105 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2106
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002107- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2108
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002109- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2110
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002111- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002112 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002113 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2114 patch #678531.)
2115
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002116- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2117 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2118
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002119- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2120 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2121
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002122- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2123
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002124- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2125 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2126 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2127
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002128- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2129
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002130- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2131 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2132
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002133- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002134
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002135- datetime changes:
2136
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002137 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2138
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002139 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2140 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2141 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2142 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2143 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2144 now.
2145
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002146 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002147 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2148 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002149
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002150 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002151 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002152 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2153 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2154 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2155 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002156
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002157 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2158 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2159 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002160 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2161
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002162 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2163 by a later example coded by Guido.
2164
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002165 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002166 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2167 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2168 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002169 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2170 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2171
2172 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2173 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2174 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2175 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2176 tzinfo subclass instance.
2177
2178 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2179 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2180 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2181 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2182 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2183 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2184 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2185 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002186
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002187 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2188 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2189 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2190 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2191 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002192 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2193
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002194 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002195
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002196 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2197 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2198 as a naive datetime object.
2199
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002200 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2201 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2202 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2203
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002204 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2205 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2206 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2207 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2208 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2209 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2210 comparison.
2211
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002212 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2213 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2214 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2215 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002216 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002217
2218 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002219
2220 and ::
2221
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002222 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2223
2224 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2225 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2226 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2227 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2228
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002229 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2230 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2231 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2232 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2233 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2234
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002235 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2236 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002237 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2238 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002239
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002240Library
2241-------
2242
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002243- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2244 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2245
2246- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2247 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2248 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2249 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2250 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2251 See PEP 307 for details.
2252
2253- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2254 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2255
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002256- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2257 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002258 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002259 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2260 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002261 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002262
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002263- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2264 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2265
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002266- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2267 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2268 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2269
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002270- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2271
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002272- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2273 exception.
2274
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002275- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2276 class.
2277
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002278- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2279 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2280 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2281
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002282- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2283 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2284
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002285- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002286 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2287 See SF bug #659228.
2288
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002289- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2290 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2291 See SF patch #651082.
2292
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002293- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002294
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002295- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2296 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2297
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002298- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002299 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002300
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002301- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2302 DOS paths from other platforms.
2303
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002304Tools/Demos
2305-----------
2306
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002307- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2308 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2309 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2310 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2311 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2312 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2313 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2314 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2315 example:
2316
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002317 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2318 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002319
2320 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2321
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002322
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002323Build
2324-----
2325
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002326- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2327 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2328 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002329 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2330
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002331 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2332
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002333- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2334 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2335 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2336 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2337 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2338 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2339 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2340 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2341 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2342
2343- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2344 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2345 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2346 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2347
2348- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2349 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2350
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002351C API
2352-----
2353
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002354- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2355 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002356
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002357- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2358 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2359 tp_as_number pointer.
2360
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002361- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2362 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2363 (SF #681367)
2364
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002365- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2366 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2367 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2368 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002369
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002370Tests
2371-----
2372
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002373- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002374 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2375 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2376 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2377 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2378 pydoc.)
2379
2380- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2381
2382- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002383
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002384Windows
2385-------
2386
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002387- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2388 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2389 time).
2390
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002391- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2392 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2393
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002394- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2395 release without strong cryptography.
2396
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002397- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002398 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002399
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002400- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2401 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2402
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002403Mac
2404---
2405
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002406- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2407 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002408
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002409- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2410 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2411 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002412
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002413- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2414 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002415
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002416- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2417 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2418 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2419 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002420
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002421- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002422 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2423 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2424 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002425
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002426
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002427What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002428=================================
2429
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002430*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002431
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002432Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002433--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002434
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002435- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2436
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002437- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2438 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002439 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002440 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002441 a different meaning than before.
2442
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002443- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002444 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002445 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002446
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002447- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002448 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002449 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002450
2451- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2452 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2453 and deallocation.
2454
2455- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2456 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2457
2458- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2459 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2460 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2461 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2462 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2463
2464- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2465 now detected by the garbage collector.
2466
2467- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2468 [SF bug 519621]
2469
2470- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2471 identifier.
2472
2473- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2474 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2475 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2476 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2477 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2478 [SF bug 563060]
2479
2480- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2481 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2482 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2483 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2484 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2485
2486- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2487 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2488 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2489
2490- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2491
2492- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2493 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2494 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2495 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2496 state of the slots would be lost.)
2497
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002498Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002499-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002500
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002501- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002502 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2503 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2504 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2505 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002506 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2507 Jython 2.1.
2508
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002509- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002510 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002511 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2512 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2513 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2514 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2515 these, see PEP 302.
2516
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002517- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2518 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2519 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2520
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002521- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2522 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2523 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2524
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002525- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2526 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2527 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2528
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002529- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2530 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2531 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2532 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2533 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2534 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2535 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2536 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2537 releases or implementations.
2538
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002539- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002540 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2541 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002542
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002543- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2544 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2545
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002546- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2547 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2548 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2549
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002550- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2551 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2552
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002553- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2554 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002555 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2556 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002557
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002558- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2559 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2560 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2561 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2562 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2563
2564 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2565 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2566 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2567 pattern.
2568
2569 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2570 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2571 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2572 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2573
2574 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2575 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2576 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2577 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2578 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2579 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2580
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002581- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2582 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2583 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2584 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2585 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2586 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2587 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2588 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002589
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002590- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2591 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2592 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2593 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2594 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002595 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2596 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2597 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2598 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2599 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2600 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2601 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002602
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002603- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2604 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2605
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002606- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2607 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2608 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2609 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2610 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2611 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2612 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2613 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2614 to Zack Weinberg!
2615
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002616- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2617 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2618 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2619 type. This has been fixed now.
2620
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002621- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2622 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2623 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2624
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002625- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2626 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2627 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2628 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2629 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2630 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2631 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2632 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002633 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002634
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002635- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2636 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2637 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002638
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002639- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2640 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2641 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2642 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2643 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2644 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2645 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2646 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002647 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002648 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2649 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2650
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002651- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2652 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2653 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2654 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2655 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2656 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2657 this.)
2658
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002659- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2660 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002661 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002662 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002663 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2664 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002665 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2666 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002667
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002668- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2669 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2670 currently running.
2671
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002672- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2673 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2674 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2675 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2676
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002677- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2678 as directory names.
2679
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002680- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2681 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2682
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002683- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2684 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2685
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002686- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002687 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2688 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002689
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002690- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2691 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2692 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2693 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2694 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2695
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002696- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2697 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2698 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2699 removed.
2700
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002701- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2702 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2703 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2704
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002705- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2706 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2707 to __debug__.
2708
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002709- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2710 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2711 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2712
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002713- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2714 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2715 deprecated now.
2716
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002717- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2718 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2719 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002720
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002721- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2722 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2723 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2724 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2725 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002726
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002727- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2728 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2729
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002730- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2731 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2732 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002733 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002734 is backward compatible.
2735
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002736- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2737 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2738 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2739 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2740 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2741
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002742- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2743 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2744 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2745 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2746 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2747 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002748
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002749- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2750 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2751
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002752- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2753 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2754
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002755- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2756 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2757 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2758 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2759 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2760
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002761- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2762 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2763 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2764
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002765- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002766 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2767
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002768- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2769 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2770 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002771
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002772- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2773 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2774
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002775- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2776 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2777 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2778
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002779- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2780
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002781Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002782-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002783
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002784- Added three operators to the operator module:
2785 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2786 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2787 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2788
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002789- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2790
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002791- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2792 archives.
2793
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002794- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2795 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2796 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2797
2798 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2799
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002800- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2801 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2802 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002803 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002804
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002805- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2806 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2807 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2808 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002809 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2810 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2811 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2812 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002813
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002814- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2815 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002816
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002817- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2818
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002819- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2820 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2821
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002822- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2823 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2824 supported.
2825
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002826- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2827
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002828- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2829 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002830
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002831- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2832 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2833
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002834- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2835
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002836- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2837 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2838
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002839- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2840 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2841 functions but callable type objects.
2842
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002843- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002844 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002845 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002846
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002847- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2848 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002849
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002850- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2851 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002852
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002853- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2854 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2855 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2856 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2857
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002858- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2859 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002860
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002861- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2862 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2863 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2864 and __imul__.
2865
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002866- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002867 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2868 is called.
2869
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002870- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2871 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2872 interpreter was compiled.
2873
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002874- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2875 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2876 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002877 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002878 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2879 1, not 2.
2880
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002881- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2882 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2883 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2884 limit.
2885
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002886- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2887 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2888 bug #623464.
2889
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002890- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2891 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2892 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2893 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2894
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002895Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002896-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002897
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002898- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2899
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002900- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2901 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2902 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2903 with Python 2.3a2.
2904
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002905- os.path exposes getctime.
2906
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002907- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002908 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002909 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002910 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002911 unit tests of floating point results.
2912
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002913- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2914 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2915 has been increased.
2916
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002917- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2918 executed.
2919
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002920- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2921 postinstallation script.
2922
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002923- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2924 test the current module.
2925
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002926- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002927 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2928 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2929 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2930 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2931
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002932- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002933 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002934 Ward's Optik package.
2935
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002936- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2937 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2938 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2939 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2940
2941- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2942 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002943 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002944
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002945- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2946 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2947 shelf are binary pickles.
2948
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002949- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2950 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2951
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002952- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2953 modules are iterators now.
2954
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002955- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2956 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2957 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2958 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2959 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2960 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002961
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002962- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2963 with their entity value.
2964
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002965- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2966
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002967- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2968 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002969
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002970- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2971 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002972 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002973
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002974- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2975 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2976 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2977 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2978 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2979 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2980 main():
2981
2982 import locale
2983 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2984
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002985- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2986 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2987
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002988- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2989 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2990 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2991 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2992 to the new standard.
2993
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002994- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2995 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2996 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2997 an extension to the database.
2998
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002999- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3000 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3001 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3002 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003003 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003004
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003005- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003006 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003007
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003008- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3009 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3010 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3011 bounded integers.
3012
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003013- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3014 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3015 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3016 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3017 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3018 in existence.
3019
3020 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3021 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3022 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3023 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3024 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3025 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3026
3027 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3028 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3029 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3030 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3031
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003032- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3033 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3034 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3035
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003036- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3037
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003038- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3039 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3040 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3041 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3042
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003043- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3044 argument.
3045
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003046- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3047 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3048 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3049 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3050 [SF patch 560794].
3051
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003052- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3053 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3054 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003055 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3056 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3057 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003058
3059- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3060 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003061
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003062- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3063 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3064 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3065 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003066
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003067- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3068 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3069 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3070 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3071 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3072
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003073- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003074
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003075- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3076
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003077- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3078 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3079 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3080 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3081 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3082 identical to None.
3083
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003084- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3085 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3086 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3087 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3088 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3089 results now.
3090
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003091- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3092 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3093
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003094- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3095 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3096 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3097 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3098 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3099 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3100 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3101 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3102
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003103- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3104
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003105- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3106 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3107
3108- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3109 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3110 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3111 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3112 and other systems.
3113
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003114- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3115 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3116 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3117 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 +00003118 work well with these.
3119
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003120- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3121
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003122- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003123 connections.
3124
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003125- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3126 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3127 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3128
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003129- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3130 sets
3131
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003132- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3133 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3134 name.
3135
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003136- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3137 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3138 passed in.
3139
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003140- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003141 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003142 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3143 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003144
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003145- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3146
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003147- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3148
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003149- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3150 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3151 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3152
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003153- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3154 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3155 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3156 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003157 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003158
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003159- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003160 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003161 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003162
3163- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3164 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3165 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3166
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003167- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003168 the value of its expression argument.
3169
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003170- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3171 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3172 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3173
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003174- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3175 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3176 skipstone browser was included.
3177
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003178- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3179 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3180
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003181Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003182-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003183
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003184- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3185 names in addition to accepting file names.
3186
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003187- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3188 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3189 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3190 still used and useful.)
3191
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003192- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3193 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3194 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3195 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003196
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003197- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3198 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3199 the generated binary.
3200
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003201Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003202-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003203
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003204- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3205
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003206- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3207 except in the hands of experts.
3208
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003209- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003210 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3211 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3212 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003213
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003214- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3215 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3216 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3217 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3218 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3219 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3220 builds.
3221
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003222- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3223 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3224 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3225 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3226 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3227 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3228 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3229 new type.
3230
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003231- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003232
3233 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3234 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3235 positive infinities.
3236
3237 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3238 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3239 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3240 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3241 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3242 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3243 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3244
3245 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3246
3247 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3248
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003249- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3250 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3251 size of the executable.
3252
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003253- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3254 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3255 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3256 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003257
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003258- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3259
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003260- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3261 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3262 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003263
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003264- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3265 well as Unix.
3266
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003267- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3268 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3269 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3270 modules in the README file for details.
3271
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003272C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003273-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003274
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003275- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3276 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003277 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003278 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003279 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003280
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003281- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3282 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3283 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3284 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3285 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3286 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003287 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003288 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3289 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3290 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3291 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3292 aligned.)
3293
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003294- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3295 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3296 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3297
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003298- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3299 level.
3300
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003301- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3302 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3303 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3304 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3305 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3306
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003307- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3308 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3309 code.
3310
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003311- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3312 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3313 adjusting for negative indices.
3314
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003315- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3316 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3317 object.
3318
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003319- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3320 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3321 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3322
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003323- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3324 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003325
3326- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3327
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003328- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3329 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3330 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3331 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3332
3333- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3334
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003335- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003336
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003337- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003338 without going through the buffer API.
3339
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003340- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003341
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003342- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3343 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3344 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3345 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3346
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003347- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3348 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3349
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003350- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003351 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3352
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003353New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003354-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003355
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003356- OpenVMS is now supported.
3357
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003358- AtheOS is now supported.
3359
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003360- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3361
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003362- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3363
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003364Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003365-----
3366
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003367- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3368 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3369 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003370
3371Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003372-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003373
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003374- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3375 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3376 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3377 bugs.
3378 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003379 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003380 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3381 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003382 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003383
3384- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003385 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003386
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003387- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3388 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3389
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003390- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3391 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003392 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003393 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3394
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003395- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3396 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3397 use files" uninstall option).
3398
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003399- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3400
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003401- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3402 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3403
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003404- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3405 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3406 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3407
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003408- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3409 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3410 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3411 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3412 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003413 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3414 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3415 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003416
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003417- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003418 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003419 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3420 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3421 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3422 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3423 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3424 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3425 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3426 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3427 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3428 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3429 work around.
3430
3431- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3432 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3433 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3434 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3435 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3436 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3437 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3438 specified with O_CREAT too).
3439
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003440Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003441----
3442
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003443- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003444
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003445- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3446 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3447 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3448
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003449- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3450 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3451 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3452
3453- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3454 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3455 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3456 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3457 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3458 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3459 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3460 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003461
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003462- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3463 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3464 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003465
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003466- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3467 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3468 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3469 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3470 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003471
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003472- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3473 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3474 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003475
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003476- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3477 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003478
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003479- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3480 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3481 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3482 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3483 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003484
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003485- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3486 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3487 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3488
3489- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3490 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3491 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003492
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003493- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3494 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3495 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3496 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003497 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003498
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003499- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3500 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003501
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003502- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3503 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003504
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003505- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003506 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003507 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3508 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003509
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003510
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003511What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003512===============================
3513
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003514*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3515
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003516Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003517--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003518
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003519- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3520 with a custom metaclass.
3521
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003522Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003523-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003524
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003525- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3526 are proxies.
3527
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003528Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003529-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003530
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003531- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3532 very short strings.
3533
3534- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3535 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3536 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3537 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3538 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3539
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003540Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003541-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003542
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003543- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3544 close or delete time).
3545
3546- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3547 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3548
3549- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3550
3551- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003552 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003553
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003554Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003555-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003556
3557Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003558-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003559
3560C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003561-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003562
3563New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003564-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003565
3566Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003567-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003568
3569Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003570-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003571
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003572- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3573
3574- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3575 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3576
3577- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3578 deleted at process exit time.
3579
3580- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3581 in backslash.
3582
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003583Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003584----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003585
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003586- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3587 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3588 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3589
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003590
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003591What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003592===========================
3593
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003594*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3595
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003596Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003597--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003598
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003599- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3600 been extensively updated. See
3601
3602 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3603
3604 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3605
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003606- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3607 deleted!
3608
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003609- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3610 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3611 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3612 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3613 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3614
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003615- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3616
3617 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3618 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3619
3620 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3621 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3622 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3623 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3624 supported anyway.
3625
3626 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3627 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3628
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003629- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3630 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3631 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3632 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3633 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003634
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003635- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3636 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3637 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3638
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003639Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003640-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003641
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003642- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3643 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3644 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3645 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3646 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3647 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003648 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3649 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3650 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3651 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003652
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003653- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3654 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3655 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3656
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003657Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003658-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003659
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003660- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3661
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003662Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003663-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003664
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003665- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3666 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3667 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3668 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3669 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3670 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3671
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003672- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3673
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003674- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3675
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003676- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3677
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003678- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3679 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3680 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3681
3682- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3683
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003684Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003685-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003686
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003687- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3688 off a search on Google.
3689
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003690Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003691-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003692
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003693- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3694 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3695 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3696 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3697 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3698 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3699 other platforms should do likewise.
3700
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003701- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3702 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3703 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3704
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003705C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003706-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003707
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003708- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3709 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3710 producing key-value pairs.
3711
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003712- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003713 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003714 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3715 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3716 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3717 previously went unchallenged.
3718
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003719New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003720-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003721
3722Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003723-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003724
3725Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003726-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003727
3728Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003729----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003730
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003731- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3732 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003733
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003734- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3735 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3736 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3737 home.
3738
3739
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003740What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003741===========================
3742
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003743*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3744
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003745Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003746--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003747
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003748- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3749 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003750
3751 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003752 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003753
3754 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3755 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003756 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003757 This needs to be documented.
3758
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003759- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3760 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3761
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003762- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3763 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3764 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3765
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003766- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3767 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3768
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003769- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3770 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3771 class forbids it).
3772
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003773- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3774 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3775 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3776
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003777- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3778
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003779Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003780-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003781
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003782- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3783 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003784 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003785
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003786- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3787 (like 1 + '').
3788
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003789Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003790-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003791
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003792- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3793 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3794 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3795 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003796 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003797 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3798
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003799- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3800 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3801 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3802 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3803
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003804- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3805 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003806 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3807 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3808 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003809
3810- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3811 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003812
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003813- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3814 bytes on its input.
3815
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003816Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003817-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003818
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003819- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003820 convenience function.
3821
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003822- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3823 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3824 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003825 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3826 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3827 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3828 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3829 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3830 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003831
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003832- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3833 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3834 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3835 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3836
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003837- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3838 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3839 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3840
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003841- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3842 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3843 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3844 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3845
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003846- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3847 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003848 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003849 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3850 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3851 new -l and -e options.
3852
3853- statcache is now deprecated.
3854
3855- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3856 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003857 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003858 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3859 time properly taken into account.
3860
3861- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3862 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3863 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3864 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3865
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003866Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003867-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003868
3869Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003870-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003871
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003872- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3873 is built with libdb3 if available.
3874
3875- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3876
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003877C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003878-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003879
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003880- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3881 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3882 PySequence_Size().
3883
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003884- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3885
3886- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3887 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3888 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3889
3890- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3891 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3892
3893- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3894 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3895
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003896New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003897-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003898
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003899- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3900 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3901
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003902- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3903 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3904
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003905- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3906
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003907Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003908-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003909
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003910- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3911 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3912
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003913Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003914-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003915
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003916Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003917----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003918
3919- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3920 removed completely in the next release.
3921
3922- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3923 OSX.
3924
3925- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3926 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3927
3928- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3929
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003930
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003931What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003932===========================
3933
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003934*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3935
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003936Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003937--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003938
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003939- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003940 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003941 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003942 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3943 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003944 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3945 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003946 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3947 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003948
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003949- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3950 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3951
3952- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3953 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3954
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003955Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003956-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003957
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003958- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3959 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3960 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3961 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3962 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3963 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3964 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3965 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3966
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003967- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3968 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3969 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3970 example).
3971
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003972- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003973 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003974 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003975 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003976
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003977- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3978 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3979 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003980 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003981
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003982- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3983 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3984 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3985 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3986 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3987 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3988
3989 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3990
3991 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3992
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003993Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003994-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003995
3996- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3997
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003998- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3999
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004000- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4001 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004002
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004003- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4004 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4005 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4006 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4007 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4008 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004009 attributes.
4010
4011- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4012 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4013 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004014
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004015- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4016 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4017 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004018
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004019- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4020 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4021 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004022 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4023 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4024
4025- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4026 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004027
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004028Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004029-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004030
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004031- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4032 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4033
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004034- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4035 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4036 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4037 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4038
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004039- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4040 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4041 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4042 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4043
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004044 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4045 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4046 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4047 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4048 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4049 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4050 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4051 without losing information).
4052
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004053- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004054 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4055 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4056 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4057 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4058 module).
4059
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004060 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004061 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4062 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4063 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4064 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004065
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004066- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004067 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4068 encoding.
4069
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004070- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4071 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4072
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004073- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004074 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4075
4076- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4077 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4078 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4079 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4080
4081- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4082
4083- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4084 ON, and OFF.
4085
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004086- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4087 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4088
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004089Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004090-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004091
4092- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4093 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4094 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004095
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004096- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4097 been added: -X and -E.
4098
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004099Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004100-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004101
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004102- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4103 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4104
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004105C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004106-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004107
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004108- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4109 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4110 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4111 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4112 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4113
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004114- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4115 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4116 as long) arguments.
4117
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004118- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4119 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4120 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4121 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4122 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4123 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4124
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004125- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4126 input.
4127
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004128New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004129-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004130
4131Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004132-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004133
4134Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004135-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004136
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004137- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4138 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4139 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4140
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004141- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4142 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4143 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004144 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004145
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004146 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4147 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4148 import signal
4149 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004150
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004151 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004152 while 1:
4153 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004154 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004155 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4156 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4157 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4158 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004159
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004160
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004161What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4162===========================
4163
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004164*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4165
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004166Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004167--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004168
4169- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4170 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4171 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4172
4173- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4174 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4175 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4176 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4177 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4178 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4179 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004180
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004181- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004182 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004183 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4184 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4185 associate a docstring with a property.
4186
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004187- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4188 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4189 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4190 other built-in object types.
4191
4192- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4193 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4194 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4195 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4196 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4197
4198- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4199 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4200
4201- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4202 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004203 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004204 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4205 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4206 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4207 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4208 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4209
4210- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4211 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4212 class.
4213
4214- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4215 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4216 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4217 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4218
4219- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4220 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4221 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4222 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4223
4224- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4225 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4226
4227- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4228 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4229 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4230 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4231 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004232 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004233 with the same value as s.
4234
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004235- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4236
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004237Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004238----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004239
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004240- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4241
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004242- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4243 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4244 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4245 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4246 objects.
4247
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004248- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4249 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004250 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4251 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4252
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004253- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4254 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4255 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4256
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004257Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004258-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004259
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004260- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4261 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4262 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4263 by the instances.
4264
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004265- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4266 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4267 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4268
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004269- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4270 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4271 before the entire comparison is complete.
4272
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004273- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4274 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4275 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4276
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004277- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4278 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4279 getwriter().
4280
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004281- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4282 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4283
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004284- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004285 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4286 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4287
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004288- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4289 iterable object.
4290
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004291- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4292 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004293
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004294- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4295 authentication.
4296
4297- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4298 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004299
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004300- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004301 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4302 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4303 a sample driver.)
4304
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004305Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004306-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004307
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004308- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4309 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4310 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4311 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4312 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4313 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4314 kernel has large file support.
4315
4316- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4317 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4318 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4319 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4320 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4321
4322- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4323 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4324 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4325
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004326C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004327-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004328
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004329- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4330 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4331
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004332New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004333-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004334
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004335- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4336 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4337
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004338Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004339-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004340
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004341- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4342 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4343 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4344 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4345 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4346
4347- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4348 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4349 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4350 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4351
4352- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4353 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4354
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004355Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004356-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004357
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004358- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004359 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4360 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004361
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004362
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004363What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4364===========================
4365
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004366*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4367
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004368Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004369----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004370
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004371- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4372 big to represent as a C double.
4373
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004374- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4375 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4376 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4377 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4378 restriction).
4379
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004380- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4381 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4382 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4383 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4384 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4385
4386 >>> dir([])
4387 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4388 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4389 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4390 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4391 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4392 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4393 'reverse', 'sort']
4394
4395 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4396
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004397- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004398 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4399 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4400 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4401 OverflowError exception.
4402
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004403- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004404 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004405 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4406 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4407 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4408 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4409 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004410 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004411 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4412 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4413
4414 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4415 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4416 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4417 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004418
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004419- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004420 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4421 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4422 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4423 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4424 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4425 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4426 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4427 once it is created.
4428
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004429- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4430 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4431 (key, value) pairs.
4432
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004433- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004434 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4435 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4436
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004437- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4438 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4439 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4440 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4441 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004442
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004443- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004444 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4445 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4446
4447 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4448
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004449- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004450 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4451
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004452Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004453-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004454
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004455- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004456 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4457 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004458
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004459- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4460 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4461 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4462 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4463 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4464 in this area anymore).
4465
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004466- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4467 threading.Timer.
4468
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004469- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4470 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4471
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004472- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004473 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4474
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004475- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004476 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4477 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4478 converted to Python longs.
4479
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004480- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004481 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4482
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004483- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4484 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4485 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4486
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004487Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004488-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004489
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004490- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4491 division operators as per PEP 238.
4492
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004493Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004494-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004495
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004496- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4497 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4498 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4499 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4500
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004501C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004502-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004503
4504- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004505
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004506- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4507 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004508 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004509
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004510 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4511 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004512 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004513 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004514
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004515- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004516 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4517 module:
4518
4519 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004520
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004521 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4522 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004523
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004524 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4525 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004526
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004527 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4528
4529 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4530
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004531- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004532 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4533 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4534 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004535
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004536New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004537-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004538
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004539- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4540 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4541 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4542 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4543 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004544
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004545Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004546-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004547
4548Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004549-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004550
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004551- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4552 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4553 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4554 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004555 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4556 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4557 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4558 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4559 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004560
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004561- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004562 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4563
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004564
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004565What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4566===========================
4567
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004568*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4569
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004570Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004571-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004572
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004573- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4574 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4575
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004576- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4577 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4578 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004579
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004580- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4581 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4582 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4583 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004584
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004585- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4586
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004587- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004588
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004589Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004590-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004591
4592- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004593 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004594 the module docstring for details.
4595
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004596Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004597-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004598
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004599- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004600 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4601 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4602 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004603
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004604- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4605 Nick Mathewson.
4606
4607Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004608----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004609
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004610- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4611 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4612 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4613 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4614 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4615 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4616 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4617 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4618
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004619- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4620 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4621 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4622 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4623
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004624- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4625 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4626 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4627 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4628 come a long way).
4629
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004630- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4631 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4632 write filters for these warnings).
4633
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004634- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4635 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4636 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4637 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4638 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4639
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004640- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4641 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4642 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4643 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4644 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4645 older distribution.
4646
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004647Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004648-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004649
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004650- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4651 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004652 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004653
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004654- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4655 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4656 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4657
4658- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4659
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004660- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4661
4662- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4663
4664- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4665
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004666- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004667
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004668- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4669
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004670New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004671-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004672
4673C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004674-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004675
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004676- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4677 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4678 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4679 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4680 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4681 against buffer overruns.
4682
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004683- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004684 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4685 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004686 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4687 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4688 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4689
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004690- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4691 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4692 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4693 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4694 deprecated.
4695
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004696Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004697-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004698
4699- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4700 relevant is found.
4701
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004702
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004703What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004704===========================
4705
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004706*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4707
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004708Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004709----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004710
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004711- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4712 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4713 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4714 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4715 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4716 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4717 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4718 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004719 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004720 repaired.
4721
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004722- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004723 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004724 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4725 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4726 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4727 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4728 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4729 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4730 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4731 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4732
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004733- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4734 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4735 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4736 leading BMO character).
4737
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004738- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4739 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4740 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4741
4742 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4743 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4744 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004745
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004746 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4747 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4748 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4749 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4750 for various simple to use conversions.
4751
4752 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4753 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4754
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004755 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4756 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4757 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4758 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4759 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4760 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4761 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4762 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4763 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4764 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4765 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4766 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4767 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4768 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4769 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004770
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004771- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4772 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4773 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004774 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004775 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004776
4777 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004778 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4779 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4780 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4781 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4782 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004783 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4784 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004785
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004786 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4787 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4788 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004789 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004790
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004791- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4792 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4793 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4794 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4795 floating arithmetic,
4796
4797 x = 9007199254740992.0
4798 print long(x)
4799
4800 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4801 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4802 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4803 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4804 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4805 functions are of good quality).
4806
4807 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4808 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4809 algorithms to break.
4810
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004811- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4812 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4813 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4814 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4815 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4816 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4817 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4818 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4819 order.
4820
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004821- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4822 operation along the most common code paths.
4823
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004824- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4825 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4826
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004827- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4828 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4829 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4830 {}.update(UserDict())
4831
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004832- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4833 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4834 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4835 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4836 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4837 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4838 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4839 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4840
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004841- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004842 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004843
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004844 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004845 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4846 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004847 join() method of strings
4848 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004849 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4850 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004851 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004852 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004853
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004854- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4855 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4856
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004857- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4858 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4859
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004860- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4861 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4862 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4863 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4864
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004865- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4866 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004867 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004868 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4869 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004870
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004871- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4872
4873
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004874Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004875-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004876
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004877- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004878 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004879 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4880 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4881
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004882- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4883 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4884
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004885- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4886 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4887 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4888 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4889
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004890- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4891 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4892 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4893
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004894- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4895
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004896- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4897
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004898- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4899 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4900 that are still imported into string.py).
4901
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004902- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4903
4904- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4905 Now it does.
4906
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004907- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4908
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004909- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4910 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4911 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4912 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4913 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004914 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4915 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004916
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004917- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4918 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4919 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4920 'help(object)'.
4921
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004922Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004923-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004924
4925- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004926 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004927 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4928 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4929
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004930- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004931 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4932 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004933
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004934C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004935-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004936
4937- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4938 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004939
4940----
4941
4942**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**