blob: 0af2c80fbaaf3297da6b6af0db137a655fc55de5 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000015- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
16 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
17
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000018- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
19 like their int counterparts.
20
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000021- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
22 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
23 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
24 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
25 for a longer write-up of the problem).
26
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000027- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
28 serializing floats.
29
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000030- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
31 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
32 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
33
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000034- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
35 278.
36
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000037- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
38 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
39 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
40 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
41 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
42 PyNumber_*().
43 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
44
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000045- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
46 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
47 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
48 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
49
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000050- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
51 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
52 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
53 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
54 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
55
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000056- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
57 disabled caused a crash.
58
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000059- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
60 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
61
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000062- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
63 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
64
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000065- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
66
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000067- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000068 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
69 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
70 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000071
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000072- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
73
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000074- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
75 returning None.
76
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000077- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
78 ('\') with a specific error message.
79
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000080- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
81
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000082- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
83 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
84
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000085- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000086 an ferror() call.
87
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000088- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
89 list.sort().
90
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000091- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
92 (2+3) --> (5).
93
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000094- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
95
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000096- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
97 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000098
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000099- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
100 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
101 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
102
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000103Extension Modules
104-----------------
105
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000106- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
107 implemented treated all integer values except 1 as false.
108
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000109- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
110
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000111- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
112 if available on the platform.
113
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000114- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
115 available on the platform.
116
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000117- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
118 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
119
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000120- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
121
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000122- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
123 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
124 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
125
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000126- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
127
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000128- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
129 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
130
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000131- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
132 file size.
133
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000134- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
135
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000136- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
137 {remove_history,replace_history}
138
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000139- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
140 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000141
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000142- stat_float_times is now True.
143
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000144- array.array objects are now picklable.
145
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000146- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
147 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
148
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000149- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
150 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
151 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
152
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000153- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
154 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000155
156Library
157-------
158
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000159- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
160 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
161
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000162- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
163 though this can be missing in embedded interpreters
164
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000165- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
166
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000167- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
168 error messages.
169
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000170- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
171
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000172- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
173 Bug #1224621.
174
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000175- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
176 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
177 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
178 terminates by raising StopIteration.
179
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000180- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
181
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000182- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
183 component of the path.
184
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000185- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
186 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
187 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
188 class at all.
189
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000190- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
191 files to PyPI.
192
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000193- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
194 them to PyPI.
195
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000196- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
197 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
198 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
199 work as expected.
200
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000201- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
202 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
203
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000204- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
205 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
206
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000207- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
208
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000209- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
210 to build.
211
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000212- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
213 symbolic links on Windows.
214
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000215- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
216 profile.py if available.
217
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000218- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
219
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000220- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
221 in LWPCookieJar.
222
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000223- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
224
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000225- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
226
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000227- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
228
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000229- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
230
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000231- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
232
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000233- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
234
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000235- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
236
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000237- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
238
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000239- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
240 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
241 be exploited in various ways.
242
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000243- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
244
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000245- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
246
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000247- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
248
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000249- Enhancements to the csv module:
250
251 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
252 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
253 PEP 305.
254 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
255 reporting.
256 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
257 dictates.
258 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000259 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000260 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000261 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
262 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000263 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
264 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000265 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000266 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
267 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
268 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
269 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
270 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
271 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
272 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
273 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
274 without first creating a dialect class.
275 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
276 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
277 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000278 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000279 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
280 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000281 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
282 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
283 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
284 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000285 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
286 This has been fixed.
287
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000288- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
289 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
290 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
291 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
292
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000293- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
294
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000295- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
296 (Bug #951915).
297
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000298- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
299 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
300 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
301 encoding alias table
302
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000303- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
304
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000305- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
306 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
307
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000308- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
309
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000310- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
311
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000312- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
313
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000314- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
315
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000316- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
317
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000318- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
319 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
320 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
321
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000322- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000323 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000324
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000325- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
326 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
327 tokenizer with very long source lines.
328
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000329- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
330 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
331
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000332- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
333 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000334
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000335- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
336 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
337
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000338- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
339 correctly.
340
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000341- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
342 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
343 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
344 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
345 between two lines.
346
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000347
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000348Build
349-----
350
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000351- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
352 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
353 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000354 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000355
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000356- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
357 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
358 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
359
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000360- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
361
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000362- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
363 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
364
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000365- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
366 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
367 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
368 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
369 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
370 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
371 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
372 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
373
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000374- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
375 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
376 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
377 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
378
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000379
380C API
381-----
382
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000383- Removed PyRange_New().
384
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000385
386Tests
387-----
388
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000389- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000390
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000391
392Documentation
393-------------
394
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000395- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
396
397- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
398
399- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
400
401- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
402
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000403- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
404 Closes bug #1166582.
405
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000406- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
407 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
408 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
409
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000410Mac
411---
412
413
414
415Tools/Demos
416-----------
417
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000418- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
419
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000420- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000421
422
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000423What's New in Python 2.4 final?
424===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000425
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000426*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000427
428Core and builtins
429-----------------
430
431- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
432 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
433 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
434
435
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000436What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
437==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000438
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000439*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000440
441Core and builtins
442-----------------
443
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000444- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
445 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
446 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
447
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000448
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000449Library
450-------
451
452- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
453 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
454 raised is re-raised.
455
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000456- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
457 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
458
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000459- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
460 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
461 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
462 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
463 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
464 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
465 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
466 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
467 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
468 by the slice are recomputed now.
469
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000470- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000471
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000472Build
473-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000474
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000475- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
476 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
477 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000478
479C API
480-----
481
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000482- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
483
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000484
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000485What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
486================================
487
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000488*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000489
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000490License
491-------
492
493The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
494is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
495changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
496Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
497intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
498durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
499the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
500License::
501
502 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
503
504says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
505to Python 2.1.1.
506
507The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
508License Version 2.
509
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000510Core and builtins
511-----------------
512
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000513- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
514 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
515 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
516 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
517 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
518 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
519 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
520 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
521 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
522 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
523
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000524- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000525
526Extension Modules
527-----------------
528
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000529- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
530 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
531 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
532 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000533
534Library
535-------
536
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000537- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
538 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
539 returned.
540
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000541- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
542
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000543- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
544 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
545
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000546- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
547
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000548- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
549 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000550
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000551- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
552
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000553- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
554
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000555- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000556 the source code is updated and reloaded.
557
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000558Build
559-----
560
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000561- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000562
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000563What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
564================================
565
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000566*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000567
568Core and builtins
569-----------------
570
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000571- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000572 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
573
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000574- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
575 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
576 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
577 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
578
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000579- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
580 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
581
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000582- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
583 constant.
584
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000585- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
586 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
587 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
588 large), and to anomalies such as
589 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
590 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
591 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
592 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000593
594Extension modules
595-----------------
596
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000597- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
598 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000599 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
600 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
601 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000602
603Library
604-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000605
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000606- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000607 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000608 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
609 --swig-cpp.
610
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000611- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
612 it is set.
613
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000614- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000615
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000616- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
617 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
618 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
619 Closes bug #1039270.
620
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000621- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000622
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000623 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000624 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
625 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
626 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
627 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
628 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
629 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
630 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
631 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
632 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
633 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
634 + Updates to documentation.
635
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000636- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
637 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
638 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
639 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
640
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000641- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000642
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000643- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
644 applications should use the getmember function.
645
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000646- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
647
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000648- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
649 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
650 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
651 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
652 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
653 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
654 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
655 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
656 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
657
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000658- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
659 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000660 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000661
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000662- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
663 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
664 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
665 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
666 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
667 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
668 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
669 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000670
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000671- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
672 the new public features (of which there are many).
673
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000674- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000675 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
676 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
677 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
678 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000679 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000680
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000681- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
682
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000683- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
684 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
685 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
686 options.
687
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000688- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
689 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
690 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
691 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
692 conditions under which non-string values work.
693
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000694Build
695-----
696
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000697- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
698 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
699 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
700
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000701- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
702 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
703 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
704 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
705 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000706
707C API
708-----
709
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000710- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
711 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
712
713- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
714
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000715- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
716 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
717 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
718 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
719 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
720 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
721 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
722 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
723 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
724
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000725- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
726
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000727- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
728 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
729 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000730
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000731Tests
732-----
733
734- test__locale ported to unittest
735
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000736Mac
737---
738
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000739- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
740 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
741 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000742
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000743Tools/Demos
744-----------
745
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000746- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
747 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
748 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
749 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
750 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000751
752
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000753What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
754=================================
755
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000756*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000757
758Core and builtins
759-----------------
760
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000761- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000762 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
763
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000764- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
765 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
766 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
767 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
768 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
769 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
770 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
771 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000772 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
773 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
774 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
775 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
776 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000777
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000778- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
779 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
780 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
781 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
782 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
783
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000784- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
785
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000786- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
787 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
788
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000789- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
790 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
791 modified the list.
792
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000793- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
794 functions is now writable.
795
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000796- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
797 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
798 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
799 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
800
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000801- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
802 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
803 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
804 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
805 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000806
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000807- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
808 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
809
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000810Extension modules
811-----------------
812
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000813- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
814
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000815- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
816 data.
817
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000818- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
819 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
820 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
821 supposed to have been truncated away.
822
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000823- Added socket.socketpair().
824
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000825- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
826 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
827
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000828- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000829 versions of Python, have now been removed.
830
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000831Library
832-------
833
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000834- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000835 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000836
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000837- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
838 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
839
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000840- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
841 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
842
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000843- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
844
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000845- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
846 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000847
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000848- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
849 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
850
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000851- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
852
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000853- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
854
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000855- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
856
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000857- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
858 Percivall.
859
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000860- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
861 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
862
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000863- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
864 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
865 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000866 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000867
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000868- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
869 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
870 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
871 and exponent.
872
873- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
874
875- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
876 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
877 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
878
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000879- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
880 to the readline module.
881
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000882- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000883 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
884 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000885
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000886- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
887 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
888 contains symlinks.
889
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000890- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
891 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
892
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000893- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
894 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
895 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
896
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000897- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
898 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
899 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
900 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
901 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
902 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
903 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
904 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
905 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
906 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
907 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
908 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
909 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
910
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000911- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
912
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000913Tools/Demos
914-----------
915
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000916- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
917 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
918
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000919- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
920
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000921Build
922-----
923
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000924- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
925 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
926 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
927 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
928 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
929 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
930 plans to do so.
931
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000932- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
933 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
934
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000935- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
936 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
937
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000938- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
939 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
940
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000941- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
942 GNU/k*BSD systems.
943
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000944- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
945 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
946
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000947C API
948-----
949
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000950..
951
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000952Documentation
953-------------
954
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000955- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
956 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
957
958- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
959 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
960 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000961
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000962New platforms
963-------------
964
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000965- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
966
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000967Tests
968-----
969
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000970..
971
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000972Windows
973-------
974
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000975- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
976 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
977 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
978 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
979 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
980 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
981 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
982 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
983 the problem.
984
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000985Mac
986---
987
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000988..
989
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000990
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000991What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
992=================================
993
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000994*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000995
996Core and builtins
997-----------------
998
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000999- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1000 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1001 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1002 sensitive code.
1003
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001004- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001005 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001006
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001007 @staticmethod
1008 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001009
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001010 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001011
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001012- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1013 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1014 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1015 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1016 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1017 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1018 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1019 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1020 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1021 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1022 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1023
1024 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1025 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1026 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1027 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1028 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1029 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1030 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1031
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001032- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1033 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1034
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001035- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001036 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001037
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001038- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001039 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001040 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1041
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001042- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001043 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1044 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1045
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001046- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1047 types that support garbage collection.
1048
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001049- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1050
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001051- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1052 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1053 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1054 Jython.
1055
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001056- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1057
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001058- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1059 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1060
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001061- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1062 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1063 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001064
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001065- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1066 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1067 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1068
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001069Extension modules
1070-----------------
1071
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001072- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1073
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001074Library
1075-------
1076
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001077- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1078 TIS-620
1079
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001080- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1081 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1082 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1083 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1084 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1085 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1086 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1087 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1088 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1089 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1090
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001091- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1092
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001093- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1094 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1095 same as when the argument is omitted).
1096 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1097
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001098- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1099
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001100- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1101 schemes are offered.
1102
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001103- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1104
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001105- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1106 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1107 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1108
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001109- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1110
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001111- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1112 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1113
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001114- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1115 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1116 when dummy_threading is being used.
1117
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001118- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1119 from a tarfile.
1120
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001121- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001122 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001123
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001124- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1125 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1126 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1127 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1128
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001129- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1130 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1131
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001132- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1133 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1134 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1135 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1136 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1137 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1138 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1139 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1140 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1141 by some other method in progress).
1142
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001143- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1144 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1145 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001146
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001147- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1148
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001149- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1150 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1151 AM Kuchling.
1152
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001153- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1154 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1155 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1156
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001157- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1158 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1159 instead of unsigned.
1160
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001161- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001162 no longer part of the public API.
1163
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001164- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1165 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1166 string methods of the same name).
1167
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001168- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001169 SF patch 945642.
1170
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001171- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1172
1173 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1174
1175 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1176 DocTestSuites.
1177
1178- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1179 that provide thread-local data.
1180
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001181- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1182 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1183
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001184- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1185
1186- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1187 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1188 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1189
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001190- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1191
1192 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1193 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1194 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001195
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001196 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1197 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1198 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1199 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1200
1201 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1202 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1203
1204 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1205 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1206 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1207 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1208
1209 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1210 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1211 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1212 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1213 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1214
1215 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1216 wrapping help output.
1217
1218 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1219 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1220 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001221
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001222C API
1223-----
1224
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001225- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1226 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1227 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1228 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1229 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1230 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1231 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1232 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1233 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1234 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1235 its visible semantics have not changed.
1236
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001237- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1238 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1239
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001240Documentation
1241-------------
1242
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001243- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001244
1245 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001246 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001247
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001248 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001249
1250 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1251
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001252- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001253
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001254Tests
1255-----
1256
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001257- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001258 platforms that use the Makefile.
1259
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001260- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1261 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1262 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1263
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001264
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001265What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1266=================================
1267
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001268*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001269
1270Core and builtins
1271-----------------
1272
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001273- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1274 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1275 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1276 objects now (one object instead of three).
1277
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001278- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1279 Windows DLLs.
1280
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001281- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1282 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001283
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001284- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1285 a new .pyc magic.
1286
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001287- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1288 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1289 be there.
1290
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001291- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1292 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1293 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1294
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001295- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1296 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1297 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1298
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001299- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1300
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001301- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1302 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1303 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001304
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001305- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1306 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1307
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001308- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1309
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001310- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001311 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001312
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001313- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1314
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001315- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1316
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001317- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1318 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1319
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001320- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1321 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1322 Fixes bug #858016 .
1323
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001324- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1325 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1326 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1327
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001328- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1329 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1330 improves their performance (about 35%).
1331
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001332- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1333 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1334 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1335
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001336- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1337 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1338 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1339 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1340
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001341- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1342 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001343 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001344 length is not known).
1345
1346- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1347 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001348 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1349 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001350 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1351
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001352- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1353 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1354
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001355- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1356 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1357 keyword arguments.
1358
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001359- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1360 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1361 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1362
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001363- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1364 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1365 cases.
1366
1367- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1368 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1369 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1370 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1371 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1372 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1373 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1374 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1375 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1376 a release build.
1377
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001378- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1379 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1380
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001381- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001382 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001383
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001384- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1385 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1386 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1387 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1388 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1389 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1390 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1391 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1392 destroyed.
1393
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001394- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1395 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1396 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1397 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1398 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1399 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1400 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1401 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1402
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001403- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1404 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1405 character other than a space.
1406
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001407- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1408 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1409 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1410 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1411 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1412 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1413 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1414 attributes with the same name.
1415
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001416- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1417 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1418 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1419 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1420 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1421 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1422 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1423 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1424 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1425 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1426 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1427 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1428 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1429 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001430
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001431- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1432 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1433 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1434 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1435 This has been repaired.
1436
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001437- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1438
1439- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1440
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001441- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1442 over a sequence.
1443
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001444- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001445 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001446
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001447- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1448
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001449- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1450 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1451 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1452 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1453 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1454 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1455 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1456 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1457
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001458- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1459 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1460 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1461
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001462- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1463 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1464 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1465 freelist.
1466
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001467- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1468 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1469
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001470- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1471 number.
1472
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001473- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1474 a TypeError exception.
1475
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001476- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1477 820195.
1478
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001479- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1480 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1481 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1482
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001483- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001484 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1485 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001486
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001487- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1488 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1489 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1490
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001491- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1492 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001493 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001494
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001495- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001496 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1497 the first call.
1498
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001499
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001500Extension modules
1501-----------------
1502
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001503- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1504 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1505
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001506- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1507 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1508 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1509 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1510 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1511 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1512 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001513
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001514- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1515
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001516- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1517
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001518- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1519 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1520
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001521- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1522 fewer false positives.
1523
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001524- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1525 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1526
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001527- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001528 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1529
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001530- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001531 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001532 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001533 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1534 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001535
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001536- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1537 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1538 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1539 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1540
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001541- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1542 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1543 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1544 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1545 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1546 #897625.
1547
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001548- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1549 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1550
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001551- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1552 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1553 and pops on either side of the deque.
1554
1555- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1556 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1557
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001558- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1559 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1560 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1561 other functions that expect a function argument.
1562
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001563- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1564
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001565- os.getsid was added.
1566
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001567- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1568 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1569 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1570
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001571- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1572
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001573- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1574
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001575- readline.clear_history was added.
1576
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001577- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1578
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001579- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1580
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001581- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1582
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001583- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1584
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001585- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1586
1587- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1588
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001589- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1590
1591- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1592
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001593- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1594 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1595 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1596
1597- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1598 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1599 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1600 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1601 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1602 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1603 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1604
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001605- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1606 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1607 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1608 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001609
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001610- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001611 iterators from a single iterable.
1612
1613- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1614 of raising a TypeError exception.
1615
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001616- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1617 as parameter.
1618
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001619Library
1620-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001621
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001622- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1623 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1624 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001625
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001626- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1627 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1628 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001629
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001630- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001631
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001632- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1633 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001634
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001635- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1636 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1637
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001638- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1639
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001640- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001641 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001642
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001643- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001644 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001645
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001646- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1647
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001648- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1649 on cygwin and mingw32.
1650
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001651- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1652
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001653- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1654 module.
1655
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001656- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1657 installation scheme for all platforms.
1658
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001659- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001660 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001661
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001662- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1663 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1664 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1665
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001666- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1667 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1668 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1669
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001670- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1671
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001672- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1673
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001674- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1675 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1676
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001677- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1678 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1679 type pattern with the same value exists.
1680
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001681- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1682 when run from the command prompt).
1683
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001684- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1685 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1686
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001687- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1688 default sort).
1689
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001690- Added global runctx function to profile module
1691
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001692- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1693
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001694- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1695
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001696- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1697
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001698- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001699 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1700 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1701 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1702 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1703 accordingly.
1704
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001705- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1706 decoding standards.
1707
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001708- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1709 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1710 called for all requests.
1711
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001712- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1713 they are passed to the compiler.
1714
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001715- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1716 indent, width and depth.
1717
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001718- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1719 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1720
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001721- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1722 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1723
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001724- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1725
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001726- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1727
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001728- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1729
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001730- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1731 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1732
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001733- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001734 for better performance.
1735
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001736- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001737
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001738- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1739 a string).
1740
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001741- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1742
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001743- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1744
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001745- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1746
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001747- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1748
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001749- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1750 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1751 list of fieldnames.
1752
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001753- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1754 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1755
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001756- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1757
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001758- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1759 empty lists.
1760
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001761- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1762 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1763 and shelves.
1764
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001765- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1766 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1767
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001768- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001769 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1770 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001771
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001772- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1773 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001774 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001775
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001776- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001777 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1778 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1779
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001780- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1781 and removed in Py2.4.
1782
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001783- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1784
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001785- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1786
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001787Tools/Demos
1788-----------
1789
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001790- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1791 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1792
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001793- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1794
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001795- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1796 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1797 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1798 destination in situations where both files are given.
1799
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001800- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1801 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1802 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1803 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1804
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001805- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1806
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001807- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1808 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1809 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1810 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1811 now.
1812
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001813- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1814 in effect
1815
1816- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1817 C-c C-h
1818
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001819- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1820 -d option was given.
1821
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001822Build
1823-----
1824
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001825- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1826 build under OS X.
1827
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001828- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1829 --enable-profiling.
1830
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001831- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1832 is configured --with-tsc.
1833
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001834- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1835 on AMD64.
1836
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001837- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1838 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1839
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001840- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1841 removed.
1842
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001843- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1844 supported (see PEP 11).
1845
1846- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1847
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001848- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1849
1850- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1851 (see PEP 11).
1852
1853- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1854 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1855
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001856C API
1857-----
1858
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001859- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1860 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1861 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1862
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001863- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1864 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1865 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1866 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1867
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001868- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1869 generator objects.
1870
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001871- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1872 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001873 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1874 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001875
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001876- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1877 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1878
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001879- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1880 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1881 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1882 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1883 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1884
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001885- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1886 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1887 about 10% faster.
1888
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001889- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1890 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1891
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001892- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1893 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1894 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1895 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1896
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001897Windows
1898-------
1899
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001900- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1901 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1902 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1903 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1904
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001905- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1906 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1907 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1908
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001909
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001910What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1911===============================
1912
1913*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1914
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001915IDLE
1916----
1917
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001918- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1919 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1920 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1921 context-menu actions.
1922
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001923- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1924 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1925 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1926 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1927 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1928 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1929 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1930 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1931 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1932
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001933
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001934What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1935=============================================
1936
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001937*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001938
1939Core and builtins
1940-----------------
1941
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001942- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001943 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001944 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1945
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001946Extension modules
1947-----------------
1948
1949- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1950 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1951 than once. This has been fixed.
1952
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001953- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1954 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1955 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1956 call.
1957
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001958- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1959
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001960Library
1961-------
1962
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001963- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1964 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1965
1966- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1967 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1968 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1969 restored.
1970
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001971IDLE
1972----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001973
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001974- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001975
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001976Build
1977-----
1978
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001979- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1980 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1981
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001982C API
1983-----
1984
1985Windows
1986-------
1987
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001988- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1989 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1990
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001991- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1992
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001993Mac
1994---
1995
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001996- Various fixes to pimp.
1997
1998- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1999
2000- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2001 more problems than it solves.
2002
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002003
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002004What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2005=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002006
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002007*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2008
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002009Core and builtins
2010-----------------
2011
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002012- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2013 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2014
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002015- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2016 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002017 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002018
2019- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2020 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2021 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002022 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002023
2024- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2025 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002026
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002027- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2028 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2029 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2030
2031- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002032 770247.
2033
2034- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002035
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002036Extension modules
2037-----------------
2038
2039- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2040 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2041
2042- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2043
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002044- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2045
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002046- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2047 contained within the _strptime module.
2048
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002049- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2050 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2051
2052- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002053 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2054
2055- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2056 the find_class attribute, if present.
2057
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002058- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002059
2060 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2061 (SF bug 763298).
2062
2063 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002064 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2065 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2066 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002067
2068 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2069
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002070Library
2071-------
2072
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002073- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2074
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002075- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2076 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2077 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2078 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2079 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2080 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2081 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2082 or Tester().
2083
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002084- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2085 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2086 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2087 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2088 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2089 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2090 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2091 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2092 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002093
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002094 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002095
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002096- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2097 weren't before was an oversight.
2098
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002099- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2100 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2101
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002102- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2103 when there are no lines.
2104
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002105- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2106 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2107
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002108- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2109 to child processes.
2110
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002111- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2112
2113- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2114
2115- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2116 xmlrpclib.
2117
2118- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2119 responses.
2120
2121- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2122 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2123
2124- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2125 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2126 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2127
2128- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2129 used as patterns.
2130
2131- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2132 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2133 than Tk 8.3.
2134
2135- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2136
2137- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002138
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002139Tools/Demos
2140-----------
2141
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002142- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2143
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002144- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2145
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002146- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002147
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002148Build
2149-----
2150
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002151- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2152
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002153- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2154
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002155- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2156 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002157
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002158- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2159 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2160 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002161
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002162C API
2163-----
2164
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002165- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2166 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2167
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002168Windows
2169-------
2170
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002171- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2172 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2173 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2174 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2175 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2176 Python exception ::
2177
2178 thread.error: can't start new thread
2179
2180 is raised now.
2181
2182- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2183 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2184 instead of from DLL teardown.
2185
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002186Mac
2187---
2188
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002189- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002190 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002191 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2192 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2193 the executable in the bundle.
2194
2195- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002196
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002197- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2198
2199- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2200 on Panther.
2201
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002202What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2203================================
2204
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002205*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002206
2207Core and builtins
2208-----------------
2209
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002210- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2211 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2212 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2213 with the -i option.
2214
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002215- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2216 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2217
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002218- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2219 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2220
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002221- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2222 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2223 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2224 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2225 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2226 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2227 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2228 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2229 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2230 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2231 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2232 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2233 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002234
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002235- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2236 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2237 embedded in a lambda expression.
2238
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002239- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2240 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2241 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2242 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2243 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2244
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002245- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2246 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2247 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2248
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002249- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2250 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2251
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002252- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2253 It's writable again.
2254
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002255- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2256 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2257 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002258 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002259
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002260- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2261 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2262 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2263
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002264Extension modules
2265-----------------
2266
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002267- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2268 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2269
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002270- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2271 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2272 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2273 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2274
2275- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2276 collection.
2277
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002278- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2279 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2280 unique within a single program run.
2281
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002282- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2283 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2284
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002285- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2286 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2287
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002288- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2289 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002290
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002291- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2292
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002293- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2294 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2295
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002296- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2297 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2298 for many BSD-derived systems.
2299
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002300
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002301Library
2302-------
2303
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002304- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2305 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2306 primary ones:
2307
2308 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2309 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2310 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2311
2312 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2313 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2314 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2315 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2316 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2317 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2318
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002319- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2320 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2321 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2322 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2323 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2324 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2325 argument.
2326
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002327- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2328 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2329 in the archive.
2330
2331- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2332 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2333
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002334- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2335 569574).
2336
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002337- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2338 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2339 no more.
2340
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002341- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2342 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2343 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2344 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2345 code coverage.
2346
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002347- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2348 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2349 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002350 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2351 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002352
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002353- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2354 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2355 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002356 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002357
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002358- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2359
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002360- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2361 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2362 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2363 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2364
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002365- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2366 handling.
2367
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002368- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2369 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2370
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002371- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2372 in socket.py.
2373
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002374- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2375
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002376- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2377 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2378 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2379 opener with proxy support.
2380
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002381- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2382
2383- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2384
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002385Tools/Demos
2386-----------
2387
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002388- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2389
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002390- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2391
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002392- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2393 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002394
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002395- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2396 files.
2397
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002398Build
2399-----
2400
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002401- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002402 different root directory.
2403
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002404C API
2405-----
2406
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002407- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2408 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2409 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2410 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2411 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2412 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2413 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2414 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2415 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2416 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2417
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002418- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2419 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2420 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2421 from Python.
2422
2423
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002424New platforms
2425-------------
2426
2427None this time.
2428
2429Tests
2430-----
2431
2432- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2433 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2434
2435Windows
2436-------
2437
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002438- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2439
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002440- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2441 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2442 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2443 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2444 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2445 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2446 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2447 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2448 that's what it's for.
2449
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002450Mac
2451---
2452
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002453- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2454 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2455 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2456 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002457- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2458 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2459- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002460
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002461SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2462------------------------------------
2463
2464430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2465598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2466622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2467661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2468683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2469697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2470713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2471724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2472727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2473729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2474730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2475731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2476732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2477733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2478735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2479740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2480744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2481745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2482747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2483749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2484751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2485753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2486755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2487757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2488760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2489
2490
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002491What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2492================================
2493
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002494*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002495
2496Core and builtins
2497-----------------
2498
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002499- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2500 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2501
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002502- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2503 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2504 and cannot be strings).
2505
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002506- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2507 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2508 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2509 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2510
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002511- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2512 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2513 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2514 Python itself.
2515
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002516- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2517 the referenced object, if it has one.
2518
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002519- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2520 the thread started at
2521 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2522
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002523- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2524 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2525 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2526 placed on a list index.
2527
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002528- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2529 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2530 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2531 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2532
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002533- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2534 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2535 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2536 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2537 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2538 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2539 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2540
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002541- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2542 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2543 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2544 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2545 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2546
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002547- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2548 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002549
2550- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2551 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2552 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2553 #693195.)
2554
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002555- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2556 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002557
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002558- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002559 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002560 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2561 interpreter executions, would fail.
2562
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002563- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002564 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002565 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002566
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002567Extension modules
2568-----------------
2569
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002570- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2571 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2572 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2573 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2574
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002575- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2576 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2577
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002578- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2579 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2580 and Greg Chapman.)
2581
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002582- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2583 recursively.
2584
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002585- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002586 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2587 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2588 leaks.
2589
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002590- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2591
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002592- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2593 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2594 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2595 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2596 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2597 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2598 #705836.
2599
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002600- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002601 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2602
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002603- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2604 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2605 See SF bug #692416.
2606
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002607- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2608 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2609
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002610- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2611 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2612 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002613
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002614- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002615 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2616 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2617
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002618- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2619 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2620 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2621 timeouts to work properly.
2622
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002623Library
2624-------
2625
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002626- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2627 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2628 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2629 future release.
2630
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002631- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2632 for querying platform dependent features.
2633
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002634- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002635
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002636- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2637 pickle protocol versions.
2638
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002639- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2640 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2641 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2642
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002643- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2644
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002645- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2646 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2647 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2648 modules.
2649
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002650- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2651 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2652 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2653
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002654- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2655 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2656
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002657- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2658 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2659 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2660
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002661- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002662 MS Office extensions.
2663
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002664- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2665 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2666
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002667- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2668 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2669
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002670- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2671 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2672 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2673 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2674 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2675 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2676
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002677- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2678 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2679 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002680
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002681- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2682 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2683 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2684
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002685- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2686
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002687- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2688 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2689 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2690
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002691Tools/Demos
2692-----------
2693
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002694- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2695 See the module docstring for details.
2696
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002697Build
2698-----
2699
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002700- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2701 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002702
2703C API
2704-----
2705
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002706- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2707
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002708- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2709 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2710 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2711
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002712- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2713 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002714
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002715 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2716 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2717 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002718
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002719- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002720 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2721
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002722- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2723 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2724 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002725
2726New platforms
2727-------------
2728
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002729None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002730
2731Tests
2732-----
2733
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002734- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2735 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002736
2737Windows
2738-------
2739
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002740- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2741 function.
2742
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002743- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2744 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002745
2746Mac
2747---
2748
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002749- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2750 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002751
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002752- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2753 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002754
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002755- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2756 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2757 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002758
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002759- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002760 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2761 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002762
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002763- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2764 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002765
2766
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002767What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2768=================================
2769
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002770*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002771
2772Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002773-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002774
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002775- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2776 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2777 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2778
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002779- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2780 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2781 (SF patch #664376.)
2782
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002783- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2784 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2785 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2786 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2787 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2788 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002789 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002790
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002791- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2792 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2793 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2794 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002795 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002796
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002797- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2798 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2799 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2800 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2801 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2802 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2803 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2804 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2805 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2806 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2807 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2808
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002809- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2810 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2811 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2812 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2813 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2814 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2815
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002816- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2817 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2818
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002819- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2820 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2821 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2822 case.)
2823
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002824- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2825 passed as unicode strings.
2826
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002827- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2828 See SF bug #683467.
2829
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002830- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2831 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2832
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002833- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2834
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002835- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2836
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002837- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2838 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2839 arguments.
2840
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002841- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2842 See SF bug #667147.
2843
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002844- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002845 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002846 See SF bug #676155.
2847
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002848- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002849 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002850 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2851 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2852 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2853 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2854 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2855 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002856
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002857Extension modules
2858-----------------
2859
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002860- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2861 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2862 tp_as_number pointer.
2863
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002864- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2865 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2866 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2867 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2868 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2869
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002870- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2871
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002872- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2873
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002874- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002875 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002876 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2877 patch #678531.)
2878
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002879- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2880 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2881
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002882- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2883 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2884
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002885- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2886
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002887- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2888 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2889 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2890
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002891- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2892
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002893- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2894 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2895
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002896- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002897
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002898- datetime changes:
2899
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002900 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2901
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002902 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2903 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2904 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2905 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2906 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2907 now.
2908
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002909 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002910 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2911 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002912
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002913 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002914 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002915 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2916 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2917 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2918 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002919
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002920 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2921 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2922 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002923 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2924
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002925 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2926 by a later example coded by Guido.
2927
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002928 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002929 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2930 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2931 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002932 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2933 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2934
2935 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2936 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2937 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2938 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2939 tzinfo subclass instance.
2940
2941 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2942 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2943 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2944 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2945 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2946 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2947 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2948 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002949
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002950 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2951 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2952 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2953 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2954 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002955 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2956
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002957 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002958
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002959 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2960 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2961 as a naive datetime object.
2962
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002963 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2964 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2965 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2966
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002967 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2968 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2969 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2970 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2971 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2972 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2973 comparison.
2974
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002975 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2976 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2977 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2978 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002979 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002980
2981 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002982
2983 and ::
2984
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002985 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2986
2987 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2988 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2989 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2990 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2991
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002992 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2993 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2994 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2995 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2996 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2997
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002998 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2999 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003000 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3001 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003002
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003003Library
3004-------
3005
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003006- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3007 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3008
3009- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3010 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3011 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3012 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3013 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3014 See PEP 307 for details.
3015
3016- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3017 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3018
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003019- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3020 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003021 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003022 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3023 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003024 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003025
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003026- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3027 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3028
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003029- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3030 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3031 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3032
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003033- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3034
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003035- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3036 exception.
3037
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003038- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3039 class.
3040
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003041- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3042 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3043 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3044
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003045- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3046 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3047
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003048- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003049 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3050 See SF bug #659228.
3051
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003052- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3053 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3054 See SF patch #651082.
3055
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003056- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003057
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003058- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3059 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3060
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003061- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003062 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003063
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003064- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3065 DOS paths from other platforms.
3066
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003067Tools/Demos
3068-----------
3069
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003070- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3071 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3072 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3073 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3074 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3075 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3076 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3077 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3078 example:
3079
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003080 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3081 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003082
3083 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3084
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003085
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003086Build
3087-----
3088
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003089- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3090 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3091 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003092 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3093
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003094 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3095
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003096- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3097 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3098 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3099 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3100 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3101 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3102 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3103 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3104 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3105
3106- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3107 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3108 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3109 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3110
3111- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3112 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3113
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003114C API
3115-----
3116
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003117- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3118 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003119
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003120- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3121 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3122 tp_as_number pointer.
3123
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003124- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3125 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3126 (SF #681367)
3127
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003128- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3129 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3130 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3131 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003132
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003133Tests
3134-----
3135
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003136- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003137 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3138 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3139 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3140 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3141 pydoc.)
3142
3143- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3144
3145- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003146
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003147Windows
3148-------
3149
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003150- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3151 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3152 time).
3153
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003154- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3155 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3156
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003157- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3158 release without strong cryptography.
3159
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003160- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003161 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003162
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003163- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3164 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3165
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003166Mac
3167---
3168
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003169- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3170 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003171
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003172- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3173 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3174 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003175
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003176- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3177 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003178
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003179- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3180 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3181 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3182 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003183
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003184- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003185 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3186 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3187 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003188
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003189
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003190What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003191=================================
3192
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003193*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003194
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003195Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003196--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003197
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003198- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3199
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003200- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3201 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003202 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003203 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003204 a different meaning than before.
3205
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003206- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003207 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003208 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003209
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003210- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003211 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003212 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003213
3214- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3215 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3216 and deallocation.
3217
3218- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3219 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3220
3221- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3222 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3223 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3224 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3225 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3226
3227- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3228 now detected by the garbage collector.
3229
3230- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3231 [SF bug 519621]
3232
3233- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3234 identifier.
3235
3236- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3237 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3238 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3239 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3240 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3241 [SF bug 563060]
3242
3243- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3244 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3245 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3246 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3247 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3248
3249- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3250 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3251 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3252
3253- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3254
3255- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3256 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3257 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3258 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3259 state of the slots would be lost.)
3260
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003261Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003262-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003263
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003264- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003265 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3266 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3267 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3268 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003269 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3270 Jython 2.1.
3271
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003272- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003273 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003274 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3275 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3276 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3277 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3278 these, see PEP 302.
3279
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003280- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3281 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3282 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3283
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003284- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3285 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3286 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3287
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003288- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3289 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3290 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3291
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003292- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3293 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3294 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3295 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3296 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3297 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3298 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3299 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3300 releases or implementations.
3301
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003302- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003303 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3304 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003305
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003306- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3307 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3308
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003309- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3310 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3311 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3312
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003313- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3314 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3315
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003316- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3317 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003318 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3319 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003320
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003321- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3322 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3323 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3324 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3325 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3326
3327 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3328 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3329 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3330 pattern.
3331
3332 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3333 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3334 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3335 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3336
3337 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3338 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3339 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3340 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3341 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3342 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3343
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003344- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3345 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3346 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3347 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3348 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3349 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3350 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3351 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003352
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003353- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3354 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3355 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3356 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3357 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003358 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3359 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3360 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3361 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3362 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3363 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3364 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003365
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003366- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3367 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3368
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003369- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3370 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3371 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3372 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3373 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3374 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3375 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3376 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3377 to Zack Weinberg!
3378
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003379- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3380 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3381 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3382 type. This has been fixed now.
3383
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003384- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3385 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3386 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3387
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003388- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3389 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3390 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3391 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3392 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3393 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3394 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3395 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003396 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003397
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003398- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3399 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3400 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003401
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003402- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3403 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3404 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3405 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3406 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3407 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3408 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3409 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003410 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003411 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3412 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3413
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003414- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3415 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3416 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3417 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3418 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3419 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3420 this.)
3421
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003422- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3423 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003424 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003425 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003426 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3427 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003428 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3429 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003430
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003431- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3432 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3433 currently running.
3434
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003435- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3436 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3437 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3438 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3439
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003440- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3441 as directory names.
3442
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003443- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3444 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3445
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003446- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3447 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3448
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003449- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003450 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3451 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003452
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003453- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3454 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3455 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3456 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3457 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3458
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003459- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3460 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3461 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3462 removed.
3463
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003464- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3465 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3466 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3467
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003468- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3469 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3470 to __debug__.
3471
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003472- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3473 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3474 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3475
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003476- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3477 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3478 deprecated now.
3479
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003480- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3481 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3482 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003483
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003484- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3485 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3486 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3487 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3488 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003489
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003490- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3491 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3492
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003493- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3494 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3495 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003496 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003497 is backward compatible.
3498
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003499- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3500 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3501 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3502 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3503 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3504
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003505- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3506 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3507 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3508 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3509 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3510 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003511
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003512- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3513 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3514
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003515- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3516 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3517
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003518- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3519 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3520 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3521 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3522 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3523
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003524- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3525 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3526 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3527
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003528- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003529 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3530
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003531- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3532 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3533 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003534
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003535- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3536 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3537
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003538- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3539 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3540 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3541
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003542- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3543
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003544Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003545-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003546
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003547- Added three operators to the operator module:
3548 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3549 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3550 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3551
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003552- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3553
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003554- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3555 archives.
3556
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003557- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3558 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3559 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3560
3561 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3562
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003563- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3564 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3565 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003566 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003567
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003568- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3569 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3570 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3571 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003572 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3573 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3574 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3575 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003576
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003577- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3578 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003579
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003580- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3581
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003582- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3583 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3584
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003585- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3586 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3587 supported.
3588
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003589- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3590
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003591- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3592 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003593
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003594- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3595 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3596
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003597- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3598
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003599- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3600 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3601
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003602- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3603 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3604 functions but callable type objects.
3605
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003606- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003607 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003608 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003609
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003610- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3611 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003612
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003613- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3614 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003615
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003616- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3617 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3618 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3619 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3620
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003621- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3622 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003623
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003624- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3625 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3626 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3627 and __imul__.
3628
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003629- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003630 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3631 is called.
3632
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003633- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3634 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3635 interpreter was compiled.
3636
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003637- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3638 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3639 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003640 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003641 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3642 1, not 2.
3643
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003644- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3645 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3646 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3647 limit.
3648
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003649- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3650 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3651 bug #623464.
3652
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003653- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3654 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3655 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3656 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3657
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003658Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003659-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003660
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003661- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3662
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003663- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3664 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3665 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3666 with Python 2.3a2.
3667
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003668- os.path exposes getctime.
3669
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003670- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003671 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003672 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003673 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003674 unit tests of floating point results.
3675
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003676- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3677 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3678 has been increased.
3679
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003680- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3681 executed.
3682
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003683- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3684 postinstallation script.
3685
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003686- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3687 test the current module.
3688
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003689- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003690 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3691 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3692 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3693 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3694
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003695- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003696 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003697 Ward's Optik package.
3698
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003699- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3700 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3701 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3702 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3703
3704- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3705 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003706 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003707
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003708- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3709 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3710 shelf are binary pickles.
3711
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003712- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3713 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3714
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003715- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3716 modules are iterators now.
3717
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003718- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3719 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3720 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3721 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3722 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3723 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003724
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003725- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3726 with their entity value.
3727
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003728- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3729
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003730- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3731 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003732
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003733- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3734 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003735 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003736
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003737- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3738 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3739 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3740 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3741 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3742 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3743 main():
3744
3745 import locale
3746 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3747
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003748- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3749 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3750
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003751- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3752 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3753 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3754 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3755 to the new standard.
3756
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003757- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3758 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3759 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3760 an extension to the database.
3761
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003762- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3763 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3764 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3765 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003766 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003767
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003768- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003769 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003770
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003771- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3772 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3773 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3774 bounded integers.
3775
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003776- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3777 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3778 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3779 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3780 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3781 in existence.
3782
3783 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3784 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3785 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3786 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3787 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3788 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3789
3790 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3791 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3792 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3793 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3794
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003795- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3796 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3797 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3798
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003799- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3800
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003801- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3802 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3803 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3804 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3805
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003806- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3807 argument.
3808
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003809- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3810 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3811 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3812 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3813 [SF patch 560794].
3814
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003815- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3816 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3817 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003818 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3819 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3820 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003821
3822- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3823 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003824
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003825- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3826 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3827 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3828 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003829
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003830- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3831 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3832 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3833 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3834 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3835
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003836- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003837
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003838- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3839
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003840- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3841 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3842 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3843 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3844 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3845 identical to None.
3846
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003847- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3848 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3849 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3850 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3851 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3852 results now.
3853
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003854- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3855 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3856
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003857- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3858 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3859 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3860 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3861 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3862 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3863 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3864 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3865
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003866- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3867
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003868- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3869 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3870
3871- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3872 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3873 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3874 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3875 and other systems.
3876
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003877- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3878 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3879 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3880 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 +00003881 work well with these.
3882
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003883- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3884
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003885- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003886 connections.
3887
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003888- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3889 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3890 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3891
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003892- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3893 sets
3894
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003895- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3896 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3897 name.
3898
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003899- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3900 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3901 passed in.
3902
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003903- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003904 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003905 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3906 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003907
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003908- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3909
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003910- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3911
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003912- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3913 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3914 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3915
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003916- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3917 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3918 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3919 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003920 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003921
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003922- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003923 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003924 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003925
3926- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3927 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3928 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3929
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003930- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003931 the value of its expression argument.
3932
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003933- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3934 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3935 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3936
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003937- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3938 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3939 skipstone browser was included.
3940
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003941- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3942 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3943
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003944Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003945-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003946
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003947- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3948 names in addition to accepting file names.
3949
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003950- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3951 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3952 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3953 still used and useful.)
3954
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003955- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3956 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3957 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3958 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003959
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003960- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3961 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3962 the generated binary.
3963
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003964Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003965-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003966
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003967- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3968
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003969- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3970 except in the hands of experts.
3971
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003972- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003973 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3974 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3975 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003976
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003977- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3978 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3979 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3980 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3981 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3982 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3983 builds.
3984
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003985- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3986 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3987 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3988 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3989 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3990 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3991 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3992 new type.
3993
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003994- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003995
3996 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3997 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3998 positive infinities.
3999
4000 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4001 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4002 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4003 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4004 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4005 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4006 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4007
4008 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4009
4010 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4011
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004012- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4013 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4014 size of the executable.
4015
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004016- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4017 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4018 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4019 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004020
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004021- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4022
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004023- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4024 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4025 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004026
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004027- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4028 well as Unix.
4029
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004030- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4031 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4032 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4033 modules in the README file for details.
4034
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004035C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004036-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004037
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004038- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4039 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004040 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004041 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004042 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004043
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004044- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4045 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4046 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4047 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4048 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4049 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004050 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004051 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4052 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4053 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4054 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4055 aligned.)
4056
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004057- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4058 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4059 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4060
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004061- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4062 level.
4063
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004064- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4065 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4066 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4067 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4068 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4069
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004070- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4071 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4072 code.
4073
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004074- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4075 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4076 adjusting for negative indices.
4077
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004078- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4079 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4080 object.
4081
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004082- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4083 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4084 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4085
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004086- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4087 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004088
4089- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4090
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004091- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4092 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4093 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4094 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4095
4096- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4097
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004098- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004099
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004100- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004101 without going through the buffer API.
4102
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004103- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004104
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004105- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4106 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4107 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4108 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4109
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004110- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4111 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4112
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004113- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004114 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4115
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004116New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004117-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004118
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004119- OpenVMS is now supported.
4120
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004121- AtheOS is now supported.
4122
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004123- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4124
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004125- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4126
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004127Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004128-----
4129
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004130- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4131 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4132 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004133
4134Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004135-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004136
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004137- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4138 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4139 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4140 bugs.
4141 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004142 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004143 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4144 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004145 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004146
4147- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004148 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004149
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004150- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4151 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4152
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004153- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4154 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004155 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004156 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4157
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004158- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4159 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4160 use files" uninstall option).
4161
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004162- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4163
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004164- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4165 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4166
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004167- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4168 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4169 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4170
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004171- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4172 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4173 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4174 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4175 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004176 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4177 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4178 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004179
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004180- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004181 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004182 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4183 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4184 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4185 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4186 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4187 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4188 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4189 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4190 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4191 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4192 work around.
4193
4194- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4195 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4196 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4197 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4198 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4199 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4200 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4201 specified with O_CREAT too).
4202
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004203Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004204----
4205
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004206- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004207
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004208- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4209 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4210 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4211
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004212- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4213 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4214 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4215
4216- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4217 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4218 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4219 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4220 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4221 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4222 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4223 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004224
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004225- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4226 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4227 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004228
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004229- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4230 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4231 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4232 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4233 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004234
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004235- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4236 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4237 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004238
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004239- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4240 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004241
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004242- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4243 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4244 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4245 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4246 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004247
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004248- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4249 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4250 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4251
4252- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4253 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4254 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004255
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004256- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4257 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4258 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4259 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004260 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004261
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004262- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4263 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004264
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004265- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4266 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004267
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004268- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004269 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004270 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4271 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004272
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004273
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004274What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004275===============================
4276
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004277*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4278
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004279Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004280--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004281
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004282- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4283 with a custom metaclass.
4284
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004285Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004286-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004287
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004288- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4289 are proxies.
4290
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004291Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004293
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004294- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4295 very short strings.
4296
4297- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4298 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4299 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4300 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4301 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4302
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004303Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004304-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004305
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004306- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4307 close or delete time).
4308
4309- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4310 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4311
4312- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4313
4314- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004315 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004316
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004317Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004318-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004319
4320Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004321-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004322
4323C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004324-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004325
4326New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004327-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004328
4329Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004330-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004331
4332Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004333-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004334
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004335- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4336
4337- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4338 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4339
4340- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4341 deleted at process exit time.
4342
4343- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4344 in backslash.
4345
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004346Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004347----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004348
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004349- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4350 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4351 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4352
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004353
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004354What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004355===========================
4356
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004357*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4358
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004359Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004360--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004361
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004362- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4363 been extensively updated. See
4364
4365 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4366
4367 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4368
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004369- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4370 deleted!
4371
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004372- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4373 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4374 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4375 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4376 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4377
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004378- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4379
4380 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4381 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4382
4383 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4384 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4385 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4386 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4387 supported anyway.
4388
4389 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4390 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4391
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004392- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4393 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4394 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4395 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4396 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004397
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004398- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4399 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4400 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4401
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004402Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004403-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004404
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004405- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4406 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4407 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4408 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4409 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4410 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004411 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4412 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4413 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4414 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004415
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004416- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4417 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4418 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4419
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004420Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004421-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004422
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004423- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4424
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004425Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004426-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004427
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004428- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4429 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4430 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4431 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4432 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4433 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4434
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004435- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4436
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004437- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4438
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004439- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4440
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004441- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4442 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4443 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4444
4445- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4446
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004447Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004448-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004449
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004450- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4451 off a search on Google.
4452
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004453Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004454-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004455
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004456- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4457 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4458 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4459 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4460 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4461 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4462 other platforms should do likewise.
4463
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004464- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4465 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4466 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4467
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004468C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004469-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004470
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004471- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4472 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4473 producing key-value pairs.
4474
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004475- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004476 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004477 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4478 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4479 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4480 previously went unchallenged.
4481
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004482New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004483-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004484
4485Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004486-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004487
4488Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004489-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004490
4491Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004492----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004493
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004494- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4495 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004496
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004497- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4498 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4499 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4500 home.
4501
4502
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004503What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004504===========================
4505
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004506*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4507
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004508Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004509--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004510
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004511- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4512 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004513
4514 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004515 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004516
4517 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4518 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004519 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004520 This needs to be documented.
4521
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004522- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4523 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4524
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004525- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4526 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4527 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4528
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004529- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4530 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4531
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004532- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4533 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4534 class forbids it).
4535
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004536- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4537 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4538 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4539
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004540- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4541
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004542Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004543-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004544
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004545- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4546 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004547 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004548
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004549- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4550 (like 1 + '').
4551
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004552Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004553-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004554
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004555- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4556 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4557 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4558 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004559 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004560 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4561
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004562- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4563 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4564 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4565 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4566
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004567- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4568 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004569 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4570 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4571 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004572
4573- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4574 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004575
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004576- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4577 bytes on its input.
4578
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004579Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004580-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004581
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004582- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004583 convenience function.
4584
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004585- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4586 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4587 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004588 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4589 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4590 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4591 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4592 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4593 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004594
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004595- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4596 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4597 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4598 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4599
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004600- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4601 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4602 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4603
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004604- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4605 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4606 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4607 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4608
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004609- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4610 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004611 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004612 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4613 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4614 new -l and -e options.
4615
4616- statcache is now deprecated.
4617
4618- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4619 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004620 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004621 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4622 time properly taken into account.
4623
4624- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4625 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4626 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4627 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4628
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004629Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004630-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004631
4632Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004633-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004634
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004635- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4636 is built with libdb3 if available.
4637
4638- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4639
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004640C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004641-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004642
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004643- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4644 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4645 PySequence_Size().
4646
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004647- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4648
4649- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4650 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4651 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4652
4653- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4654 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4655
4656- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4657 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4658
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004659New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004660-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004661
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004662- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4663 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4664
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004665- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4666 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4667
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004668- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4669
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004670Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004671-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004672
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004673- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4674 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4675
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004676Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004677-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004678
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004679Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004680----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004681
4682- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4683 removed completely in the next release.
4684
4685- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4686 OSX.
4687
4688- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4689 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4690
4691- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4692
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004693
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004694What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004695===========================
4696
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004697*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4698
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004699Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004700--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004701
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004702- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004703 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004704 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004705 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4706 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004707 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4708 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004709 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4710 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004711
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004712- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4713 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4714
4715- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4716 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4717
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004718Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004719-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004720
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004721- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4722 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4723 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4724 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4725 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4726 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4727 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4728 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4729
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004730- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4731 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4732 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4733 example).
4734
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004735- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004736 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004737 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004738 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004739
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004740- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4741 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4742 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004743 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004744
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004745- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4746 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4747 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4748 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4749 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4750 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4751
4752 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4753
4754 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4755
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004756Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004757-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004758
4759- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4760
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004761- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4762
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004763- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4764 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004765
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004766- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4767 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4768 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4769 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4770 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4771 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004772 attributes.
4773
4774- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4775 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4776 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004777
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004778- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4779 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4780 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004781
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004782- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4783 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4784 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004785 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4786 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4787
4788- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4789 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004790
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004791Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004792-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004793
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004794- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4795 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4796
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004797- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4798 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4799 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4800 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4801
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004802- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4803 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4804 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4805 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4806
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004807 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4808 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4809 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4810 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4811 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4812 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4813 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4814 without losing information).
4815
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004816- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004817 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4818 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4819 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4820 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4821 module).
4822
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004823 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004824 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4825 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4826 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4827 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004828
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004829- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004830 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4831 encoding.
4832
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004833- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4834 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4835
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004836- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004837 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4838
4839- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4840 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4841 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4842 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4843
4844- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4845
4846- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4847 ON, and OFF.
4848
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004849- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4850 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4851
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004852Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004853-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004854
4855- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4856 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4857 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004858
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004859- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4860 been added: -X and -E.
4861
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004862Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004863-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004864
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004865- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4866 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4867
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004868C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004869-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004870
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004871- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4872 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4873 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4874 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4875 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4876
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004877- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4878 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4879 as long) arguments.
4880
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004881- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4882 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4883 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4884 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4885 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4886 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4887
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004888- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4889 input.
4890
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004891New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004892-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004893
4894Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004895-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004896
4897Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004898-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004899
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004900- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4901 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4902 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4903
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004904- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4905 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4906 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004907 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004908
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004909 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4910 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4911 import signal
4912 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004913
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004914 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004915 while 1:
4916 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004917 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004918 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4919 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4920 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4921 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004922
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004923
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004924What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4925===========================
4926
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004927*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4928
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004929Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004930--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004931
4932- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4933 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4934 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4935
4936- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4937 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4938 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4939 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4940 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4941 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4942 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004943
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004944- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004945 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004946 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4947 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4948 associate a docstring with a property.
4949
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004950- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4951 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4952 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4953 other built-in object types.
4954
4955- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4956 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4957 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4958 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4959 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4960
4961- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4962 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4963
4964- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4965 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004966 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004967 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4968 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4969 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4970 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4971 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4972
4973- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4974 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4975 class.
4976
4977- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4978 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4979 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4980 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4981
4982- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4983 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4984 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4985 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4986
4987- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4988 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4989
4990- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4991 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4992 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4993 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4994 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004995 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004996 with the same value as s.
4997
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004998- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4999
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005000Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005001----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005002
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005003- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5004
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005005- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5006 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5007 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5008 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5009 objects.
5010
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005011- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5012 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005013 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5014 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5015
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005016- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5017 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5018 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5019
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005020Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005021-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005022
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005023- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5024 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5025 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5026 by the instances.
5027
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005028- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5029 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5030 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5031
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005032- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5033 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5034 before the entire comparison is complete.
5035
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005036- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5037 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5038 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5039
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005040- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5041 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5042 getwriter().
5043
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005044- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5045 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5046
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005047- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005048 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5049 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5050
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005051- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5052 iterable object.
5053
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005054- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5055 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005056
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005057- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5058 authentication.
5059
5060- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5061 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005062
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005063- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005064 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5065 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5066 a sample driver.)
5067
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005068Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005069-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005070
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005071- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5072 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5073 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5074 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5075 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5076 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5077 kernel has large file support.
5078
5079- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5080 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5081 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5082 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5083 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5084
5085- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5086 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5087 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5088
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005089C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005090-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005091
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005092- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5093 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5094
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005095New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005096-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005097
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005098- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5099 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5100
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005101Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005102-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005103
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005104- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5105 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5106 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5107 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5108 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5109
5110- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5111 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5112 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5113 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5114
5115- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5116 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5117
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005118Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005119-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005120
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005121- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005122 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5123 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005124
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005125
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005126What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5127===========================
5128
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005129*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5130
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005131Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005132----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005133
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005134- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5135 big to represent as a C double.
5136
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005137- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5138 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5139 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5140 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5141 restriction).
5142
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005143- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5144 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5145 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5146 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5147 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5148
5149 >>> dir([])
5150 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5151 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5152 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5153 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5154 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5155 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5156 'reverse', 'sort']
5157
5158 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5159
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005160- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005161 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5162 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5163 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5164 OverflowError exception.
5165
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005166- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005167 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005168 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5169 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5170 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5171 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5172 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005173 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005174 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5175 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5176
5177 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5178 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5179 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5180 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005181
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005182- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005183 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5184 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5185 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5186 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5187 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5188 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5189 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5190 once it is created.
5191
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005192- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5193 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5194 (key, value) pairs.
5195
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005196- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005197 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5198 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5199
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005200- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5201 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5202 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5203 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5204 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005205
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005206- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005207 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5208 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5209
5210 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5211
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005212- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005213 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5214
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005215Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005216-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005217
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005218- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005219 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5220 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005221
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005222- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5223 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5224 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5225 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5226 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5227 in this area anymore).
5228
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005229- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5230 threading.Timer.
5231
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005232- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5233 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5234
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005235- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005236 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5237
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005238- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005239 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5240 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5241 converted to Python longs.
5242
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005243- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005244 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5245
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005246- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5247 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5248 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5249
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005250Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005251-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005252
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005253- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5254 division operators as per PEP 238.
5255
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005256Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005257-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005258
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005259- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5260 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5261 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5262 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5263
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005264C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005265-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005266
5267- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005268
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005269- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5270 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005271 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005272
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005273 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5274 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005275 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005276 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005277
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005278- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005279 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5280 module:
5281
5282 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005283
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005284 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5285 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005286
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005287 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5288 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005289
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005290 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5291
5292 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5293
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005294- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005295 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5296 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5297 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005298
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005299New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005300-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005301
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005302- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5303 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5304 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5305 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5306 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005307
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005308Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005309-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005310
5311Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005312-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005313
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005314- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5315 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5316 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5317 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005318 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5319 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5320 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5321 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5322 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005323
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005324- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005325 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5326
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005327
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005328What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5329===========================
5330
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005331*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5332
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005333Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005334-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005335
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005336- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5337 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5338
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005339- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5340 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5341 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005342
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005343- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5344 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5345 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5346 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005347
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005348- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5349
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005350- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005351
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005352Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005353-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005354
5355- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005356 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005357 the module docstring for details.
5358
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005359Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005360-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005361
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005362- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005363 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5364 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5365 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005366
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005367- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5368 Nick Mathewson.
5369
5370Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005371----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005372
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005373- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5374 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5375 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5376 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5377 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5378 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5379 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5380 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5381
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005382- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5383 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5384 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5385 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5386
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005387- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5388 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5389 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5390 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5391 come a long way).
5392
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005393- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5394 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5395 write filters for these warnings).
5396
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005397- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5398 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5399 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5400 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5401 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5402
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005403- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5404 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5405 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5406 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5407 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5408 older distribution.
5409
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005410Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005411-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005412
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005413- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5414 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005415 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005416
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005417- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5418 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5419 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5420
5421- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5422
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005423- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5424
5425- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5426
5427- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5428
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005429- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005430
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005431- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5432
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005433New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005434-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005435
5436C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005437-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005438
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005439- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5440 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5441 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5442 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5443 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5444 against buffer overruns.
5445
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005446- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005447 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5448 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005449 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5450 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5451 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5452
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005453- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5454 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5455 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5456 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5457 deprecated.
5458
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005459Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005460-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005461
5462- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5463 relevant is found.
5464
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005465
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005466What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005467===========================
5468
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005469*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5470
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005471Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005472----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005473
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005474- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5475 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5476 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5477 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5478 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5479 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5480 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5481 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005482 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005483 repaired.
5484
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005485- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005486 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005487 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5488 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5489 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5490 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5491 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5492 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5493 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5494 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5495
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005496- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5497 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5498 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5499 leading BMO character).
5500
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005501- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5502 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5503 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5504
5505 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5506 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5507 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005508
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005509 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5510 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5511 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5512 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5513 for various simple to use conversions.
5514
5515 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5516 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5517
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005518 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5519 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5520 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5521 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5522 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5523 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5524 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5525 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5526 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5527 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5528 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5529 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5530 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5531 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5532 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005533
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005534- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5535 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5536 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005537 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005538 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005539
5540 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005541 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5542 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5543 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5544 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5545 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005546 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5547 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005548
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005549 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5550 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5551 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005552 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005553
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005554- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5555 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5556 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5557 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5558 floating arithmetic,
5559
5560 x = 9007199254740992.0
5561 print long(x)
5562
5563 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5564 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5565 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5566 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5567 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5568 functions are of good quality).
5569
5570 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5571 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5572 algorithms to break.
5573
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005574- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5575 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5576 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5577 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5578 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5579 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5580 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5581 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5582 order.
5583
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005584- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5585 operation along the most common code paths.
5586
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005587- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5588 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5589
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005590- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5591 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5592 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5593 {}.update(UserDict())
5594
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005595- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5596 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5597 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5598 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5599 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5600 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5601 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5602 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5603
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005604- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005605 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005606
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005607 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005608 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5609 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005610 join() method of strings
5611 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005612 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5613 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005614 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005615 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005616
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005617- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5618 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5619
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005620- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5621 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5622
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005623- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5624 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5625 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5626 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5627
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005628- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5629 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005630 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005631 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5632 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005633
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005634- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5635
5636
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005637Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005638-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005639
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005640- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005641 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005642 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5643 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5644
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005645- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5646 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5647
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005648- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5649 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5650 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5651 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5652
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005653- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5654 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5655 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5656
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005657- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5658
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005659- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5660
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005661- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5662 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5663 that are still imported into string.py).
5664
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005665- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5666
5667- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5668 Now it does.
5669
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005670- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5671
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005672- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5673 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5674 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5675 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5676 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005677 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5678 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005679
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005680- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5681 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5682 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5683 'help(object)'.
5684
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005685Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005686-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005687
5688- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005689 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005690 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5691 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5692
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005693- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005694 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5695 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005696
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005697C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005698-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005699
5700- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5701 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005702
5703----
5704
5705**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**