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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwis6caea372003-11-18 19:46:25 +000015- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
16
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +000017- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
18
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +000019- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
20 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
21 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
22 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
23 This has been repaired.
24
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +000025- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
26 over a sequence.
27
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +000028- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
29
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +000030- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
31 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
32 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
33 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
34 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
35 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
36 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
37 records with equal keys is unchanged).
38
Raymond Hettinger0a9b9da2003-10-29 06:54:43 +000039- Added a list.sorted() classmethod that returns a new sorted list
40 from any iterable.
Alex Martellidd666452003-10-25 13:02:57 +000041
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +000042- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
43 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
44 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
45
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +000046- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
47 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
48 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
49 freelist.
50
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +000051- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
52 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
53
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +000054- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
55 number.
56
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +000057- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
58 a TypeError exception.
59
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +000060- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
61 820195.
62
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +000063- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
64 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
65 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
66
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000067Extension modules
68-----------------
69
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +000070- os.getsid was added.
71
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +000072- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
73 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
74 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
75
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +000076- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
77
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +000078- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
79
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +000080- readline.clear_history was added.
81
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +000082- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
83
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +000084- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
85
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +000086- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
87
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +000088- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
89
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +000090- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
91
92- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
93
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +000094- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
95
96- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
97
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +000098- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
99 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
100 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
101
102- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
103 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
104 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
105 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
106 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
107 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
108 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
109
110- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
111 iterators from a single iterable.
112
113- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
114 of raising a TypeError exception.
115
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000116Library
117-------
118
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000119- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
120
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000121- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
122
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000123- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
124
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000125- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
126 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
127
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000128- heapq.py has been converted to C for improved performance
129
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000130- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
131 a string).
132
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000133- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
134
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000135- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
136
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000137- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
138
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000139- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
140
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000141- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
142 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
143 list of fieldnames.
144
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000145- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
146 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
147
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000148- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
149
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000150- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
151 empty lists.
152
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000153- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
154 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
155 and shelves.
156
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000157- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
158 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
159
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000160- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000161 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
162 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000163
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000164- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
165 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000166 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000167
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000168- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000169 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
170 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
171
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000172- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
173 and removed in Py2.4.
174
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000175- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
176
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000177Tools/Demos
178-----------
179
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000180- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
181
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000182- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
183 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
184 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
185 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
186
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000187- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
188
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000189- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
190 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
191 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
192 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
193 now.
194
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000195- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
196 in effect
197
198- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
199 C-c C-h
200
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000201- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
202 -d option was given.
203
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000204Build
205-----
206
207C API
208-----
209
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000210- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
211 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
212
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000213- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
214 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
215 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
216 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
217
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000218New platforms
219-------------
220
221Tests
222-----
223
224Windows
225-------
226
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000227- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
228 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
229 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
230
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000231Mac
232----
233
234
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000235What's New in Python 2.3 final?
236===============================
237
238*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
239
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000240IDLE
241----
242
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000243- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
244 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
245 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
246 context-menu actions.
247
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000248- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
249 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
250 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
251 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
252 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
253 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
254 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
255 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
256 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
257
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000258
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000259What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
260=============================================
261
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000262*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000263
264Core and builtins
265-----------------
266
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000267- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000268 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000269 comment at the end are still unsupported.
270
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000271Extension modules
272-----------------
273
274- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
275 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
276 than once. This has been fixed.
277
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000278- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
279 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
280 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
281 call.
282
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000283- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
284
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000285Library
286-------
287
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000288- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
289 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
290
291- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
292 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
293 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
294 restored.
295
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000296IDLE
297----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000298
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000299- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000300
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000301Build
302-----
303
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000304- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
305 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
306
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000307C API
308-----
309
310Windows
311-------
312
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000313- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
314 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
315
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000316- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
317
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000318Mac
319---
320
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000321- Various fixes to pimp.
322
323- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
324
325- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
326 more problems than it solves.
327
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000328
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000329What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
330=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000331
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000332*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
333
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000334Core and builtins
335-----------------
336
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000337- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
338 by sys.setcheckinterval().
339
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000340- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
341 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000342 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000343
344- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
345 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
346 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000347 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000348
349- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
350 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000351
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000352- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
353 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
354 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
355
356- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000357 770247.
358
359- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000360
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000361Extension modules
362-----------------
363
364- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
365 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
366
367- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
368
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000369- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
370
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000371- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
372 contained within the _strptime module.
373
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000374- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
375 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
376
377- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000378 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
379
380- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
381 the find_class attribute, if present.
382
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000383- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000384
385 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
386 (SF bug 763298).
387
388 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000389 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
390 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
391 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000392
393 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
394
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000395Library
396-------
397
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000398- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
399
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000400- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
401 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
402 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
403 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
404 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
405 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
406 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
407 or Tester().
408
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000409- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
410 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
411 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
412 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
413 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
414 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
415 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
416 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
417 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000418
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000419 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000420
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000421- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
422 weren't before was an oversight.
423
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000424- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
425 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
426
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000427- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
428 when there are no lines.
429
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000430- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
431 which could occur with Tk 8.4
432
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000433- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
434 to child processes.
435
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000436- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
437
438- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
439
440- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
441 xmlrpclib.
442
443- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
444 responses.
445
446- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
447 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
448
449- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
450 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
451 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
452
453- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
454 used as patterns.
455
456- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
457 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
458 than Tk 8.3.
459
460- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
461
462- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000463
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000464Tools/Demos
465-----------
466
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000467- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
468
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000469- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
470
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000471- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000472
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000473Build
474-----
475
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000476- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
477
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000478- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
479
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000480- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
481 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000482
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000483- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
484 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
485 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000486
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000487C API
488-----
489
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000490- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
491 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
492
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000493Windows
494-------
495
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000496- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
497 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
498 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
499 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
500 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
501 Python exception ::
502
503 thread.error: can't start new thread
504
505 is raised now.
506
507- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
508 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
509 instead of from DLL teardown.
510
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000511Mac
512---
513
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000514- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000515 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000516 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
517 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
518 the executable in the bundle.
519
520- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000521
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000522- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
523
524- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
525 on Panther.
526
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000527What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
528================================
529
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000530*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000531
532Core and builtins
533-----------------
534
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000535- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
536 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
537 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
538 with the -i option.
539
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000540- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
541 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
542
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000543- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
544 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
545
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000546- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
547 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
548 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
549 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
550 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
551 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
552 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
553 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
554 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
555 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
556 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
557 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
558 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000559
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000560- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
561 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
562 embedded in a lambda expression.
563
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000564- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
565 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
566 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
567 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
568 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
569
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000570- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
571 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
572 matches the restriction on classic classes.
573
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000574- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
575 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
576
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000577- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
578 It's writable again.
579
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000580- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
581 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
582 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000583 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000584
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000585- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
586 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
587 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
588
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000589Extension modules
590-----------------
591
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000592- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
593 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
594
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000595- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
596 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
597 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
598 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
599
600- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
601 collection.
602
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000603- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
604 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
605 unique within a single program run.
606
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000607- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
608 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
609
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000610- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
611 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
612
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000613- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
614 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000615
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000616- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
617
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000618- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
619 Fixes SF bug #730685.
620
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000621- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
622 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
623 for many BSD-derived systems.
624
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000625
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000626Library
627-------
628
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000629- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
630 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
631 primary ones:
632
633 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
634 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
635 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
636
637 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
638 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
639 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
640 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
641 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
642 framework features (which doctest lacks).
643
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000644- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
645 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
646 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
647 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
648 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
649 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
650 argument.
651
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000652- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
653 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
654 in the archive.
655
656- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
657 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
658
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000659- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
660 569574).
661
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000662- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
663 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
664 no more.
665
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000666- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
667 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
668 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
669 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
670 code coverage.
671
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000672- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
673 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
674 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000675 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
676 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000677
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000678- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
679 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
680 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000681 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000682
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000683- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
684
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000685- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
686 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
687 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
688 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
689
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000690- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
691 handling.
692
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000693- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
694 __doc__ of data descriptors.
695
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000696- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
697 in socket.py.
698
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000699- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
700
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000701- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
702 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
703 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
704 opener with proxy support.
705
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000706- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
707
708- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
709
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000710Tools/Demos
711-----------
712
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000713- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
714
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000715- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
716
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000717- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
718 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000719
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000720- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
721 files.
722
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000723Build
724-----
725
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000726- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000727 different root directory.
728
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000729C API
730-----
731
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000732- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
733 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
734 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
735 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
736 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
737 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
738 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
739 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
740 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
741 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
742
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000743- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
744 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
745 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
746 from Python.
747
748
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000749New platforms
750-------------
751
752None this time.
753
754Tests
755-----
756
757- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
758 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
759
760Windows
761-------
762
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000763- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
764
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000765- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
766 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
767 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
768 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
769 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
770 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
771 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
772 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
773 that's what it's for.
774
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000775Mac
776---
777
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000778- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
779 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
780 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
781 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000782- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
783 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
784- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000785
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000786SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
787------------------------------------
788
789430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
790598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
791622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
792661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
793683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
794697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
795713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
796724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
797727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
798729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
799730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
800731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
801732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
802733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
803735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
804740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
805744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
806745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
807747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
808749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
809751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
810753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
811755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
812757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
813760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
814
815
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000816What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
817================================
818
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000819*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000820
821Core and builtins
822-----------------
823
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000824- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
825 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
826
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000827- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
828 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
829 and cannot be strings).
830
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000831- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
832 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
833 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
834 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
835
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000836- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
837 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
838 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
839 Python itself.
840
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000841- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
842 the referenced object, if it has one.
843
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000844- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
845 the thread started at
846 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
847
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000848- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
849 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
850 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
851 placed on a list index.
852
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000853- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
854 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
855 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
856 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
857
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000858- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
859 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
860 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
861 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
862 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
863 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
864 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
865
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000866- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
867 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
868 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
869 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
870 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
871
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000872- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
873 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000874
875- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
876 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
877 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
878 #693195.)
879
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000880- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
881 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000882
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000883- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000884 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000885 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
886 interpreter executions, would fail.
887
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000888- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000889 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000890 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000891
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000892Extension modules
893-----------------
894
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000895- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
896 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
897 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
898 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
899
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000900- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
901 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
902
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000903- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
904 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
905 and Greg Chapman.)
906
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000907- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
908 recursively.
909
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000910- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000911 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
912 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
913 leaks.
914
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000915- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
916
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000917- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
918 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
919 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
920 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
921 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
922 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
923 #705836.
924
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000925- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000926 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
927
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000928- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
929 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
930 See SF bug #692416.
931
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000932- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
933 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
934
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000935- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
936 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
937 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000938
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000939- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000940 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
941 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
942
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000943- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
944 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
945 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
946 timeouts to work properly.
947
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000948Library
949-------
950
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000951- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
952 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
953 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
954 future release.
955
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000956- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
957 for querying platform dependent features.
958
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000959- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000960
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000961- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
962 pickle protocol versions.
963
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000964- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
965 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
966 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
967
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000968- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
969
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000970- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
971 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
972 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
973 modules.
974
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000975- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
976 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
977 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
978
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000979- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
980 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
981
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000982- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
983 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
984 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
985
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000986- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000987 MS Office extensions.
988
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000989- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
990 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
991
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000992- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
993 execution speed of expressions and statements.
994
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000995- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
996 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
997 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
998 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
999 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1000 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1001
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001002- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1003 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1004 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001005
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001006- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1007 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1008 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1009
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001010- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1011
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001012- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1013 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1014 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1015
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001016Tools/Demos
1017-----------
1018
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001019- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1020 See the module docstring for details.
1021
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001022Build
1023-----
1024
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001025- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1026 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001027
1028C API
1029-----
1030
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001031- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1032
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001033- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1034 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1035 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1036
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001037- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1038 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001039
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001040 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1041 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1042 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001043
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001044- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001045 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1046
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001047- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1048 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1049 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001050
1051New platforms
1052-------------
1053
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001054None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001055
1056Tests
1057-----
1058
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001059- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1060 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001061
1062Windows
1063-------
1064
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001065- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1066 function.
1067
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001068- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1069 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001070
1071Mac
1072---
1073
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001074- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1075 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001076
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001077- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1078 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001079
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001080- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1081 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1082 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001083
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001084- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001085 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1086 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001087
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001088- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1089 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001090
1091
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001092What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1093=================================
1094
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001095*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001096
1097Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001098-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001099
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001100- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1101 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1102 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1103
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001104- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1105 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1106 (SF patch #664376.)
1107
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001108- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1109 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1110 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1111 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1112 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1113 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001114 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001115
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001116- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1117 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1118 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1119 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001120 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001121
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001122- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1123 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1124 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1125 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1126 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1127 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1128 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1129 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1130 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1131 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1132 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1133
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001134- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1135 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1136 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1137 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1138 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1139 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1140
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001141- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1142 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1143
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001144- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1145 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1146 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1147 case.)
1148
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001149- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1150 passed as unicode strings.
1151
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001152- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1153 See SF bug #683467.
1154
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001155- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1156 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1157
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001158- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1159
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001160- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1161
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001162- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1163 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1164 arguments.
1165
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001166- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1167 See SF bug #667147.
1168
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001169- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001170 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001171 See SF bug #676155.
1172
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001173- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001174 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001175 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1176 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1177 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1178 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1179 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1180 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001181
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001182Extension modules
1183-----------------
1184
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001185- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1186 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1187 tp_as_number pointer.
1188
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001189- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1190 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1191 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1192 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1193 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1194
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001195- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1196
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001197- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1198
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001199- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001200 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001201 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1202 patch #678531.)
1203
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001204- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1205 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1206
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001207- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1208 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1209
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001210- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1211
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001212- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1213 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1214 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1215
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001216- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1217
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001218- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1219 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1220
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001221- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001222
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001223- datetime changes:
1224
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001225 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1226
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001227 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1228 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1229 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1230 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1231 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1232 now.
1233
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001234 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001235 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1236 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001237
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001238 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001239 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001240 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1241 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1242 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1243 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001244
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001245 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1246 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1247 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001248 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1249
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001250 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1251 by a later example coded by Guido.
1252
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001253 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001254 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1255 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1256 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001257 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1258 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1259
1260 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1261 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1262 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1263 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1264 tzinfo subclass instance.
1265
1266 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1267 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1268 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1269 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1270 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1271 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1272 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1273 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001274
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001275 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1276 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1277 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1278 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1279 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001280 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1281
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001282 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001283
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001284 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1285 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1286 as a naive datetime object.
1287
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001288 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1289 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1290 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1291
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001292 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1293 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1294 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1295 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1296 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1297 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1298 comparison.
1299
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001300 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1301 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1302 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1303 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001304 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001305
1306 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001307
1308 and ::
1309
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001310 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1311
1312 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1313 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1314 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1315 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1316
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001317 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1318 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1319 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1320 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1321 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1322
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001323 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1324 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001325 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1326 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001327
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001328Library
1329-------
1330
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001331- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1332 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1333
1334- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1335 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1336 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1337 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1338 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1339 See PEP 307 for details.
1340
1341- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1342 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1343
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001344- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1345 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001346 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001347 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1348 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001349 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001350
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001351- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1352 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1353
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001354- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1355 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1356 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1357
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001358- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1359
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001360- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1361 exception.
1362
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001363- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1364 class.
1365
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001366- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1367 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1368 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1369
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001370- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1371 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1372
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001373- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001374 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1375 See SF bug #659228.
1376
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001377- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1378 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1379 See SF patch #651082.
1380
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001381- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001382
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001383- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1384 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1385
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001386- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001387 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001388
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001389- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1390 DOS paths from other platforms.
1391
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001392Tools/Demos
1393-----------
1394
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001395- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1396 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1397 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1398 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1399 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1400 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1401 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1402 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1403 example:
1404
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001405 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1406 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001407
1408 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1409
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001410
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001411Build
1412-----
1413
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001414- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1415 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1416 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001417 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1418
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001419 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1420
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001421- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1422 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1423 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1424 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1425 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1426 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1427 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1428 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1429 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1430
1431- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1432 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1433 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1434 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1435
1436- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1437 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1438
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001439C API
1440-----
1441
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001442- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1443 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001444
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001445- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1446 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1447 tp_as_number pointer.
1448
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001449- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1450 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1451 (SF #681367)
1452
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001453- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1454 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1455 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1456 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001457
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001458Tests
1459-----
1460
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001461- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001462 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1463 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1464 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1465 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1466 pydoc.)
1467
1468- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1469
1470- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001471
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001472Windows
1473-------
1474
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001475- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1476 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1477 time).
1478
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001479- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1480 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1481
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001482- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1483 release without strong cryptography.
1484
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001485- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001486 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001487
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001488- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1489 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1490
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001491Mac
1492---
1493
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001494- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1495 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001496
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001497- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1498 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1499 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001500
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001501- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1502 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001503
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001504- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1505 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1506 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1507 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001508
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001509- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001510 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1511 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1512 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001513
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001514
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001515What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001516=================================
1517
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001518*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001519
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001520Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001521--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001522
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001523- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1524
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001525- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1526 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001527 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001528 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001529 a different meaning than before.
1530
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001531- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001532 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001533 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001534
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001535- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001536 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001537 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001538
1539- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1540 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1541 and deallocation.
1542
1543- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1544 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1545
1546- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1547 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1548 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1549 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1550 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1551
1552- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1553 now detected by the garbage collector.
1554
1555- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1556 [SF bug 519621]
1557
1558- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1559 identifier.
1560
1561- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1562 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1563 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1564 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1565 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1566 [SF bug 563060]
1567
1568- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1569 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1570 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1571 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1572 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1573
1574- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1575 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1576 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1577
1578- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1579
1580- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1581 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1582 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1583 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1584 state of the slots would be lost.)
1585
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001586Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001587-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001588
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001589- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001590 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1591 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1592 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1593 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001594 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1595 Jython 2.1.
1596
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001597- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001598 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001599 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1600 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1601 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1602 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1603 these, see PEP 302.
1604
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001605- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1606 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1607 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1608
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001609- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1610 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1611 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1612
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001613- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1614 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1615 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1616
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001617- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1618 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1619 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1620 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1621 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1622 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1623 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1624 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1625 releases or implementations.
1626
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001627- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001628 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1629 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001630
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001631- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1632 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1633
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001634- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1635 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1636 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1637
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001638- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1639 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1640
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001641- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1642 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001643 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1644 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001645
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001646- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1647 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1648 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1649 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1650 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1651
1652 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1653 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1654 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1655 pattern.
1656
1657 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1658 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1659 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1660 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1661
1662 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1663 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1664 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1665 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1666 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1667 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1668
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001669- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1670 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1671 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1672 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1673 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1674 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1675 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1676 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001677
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001678- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1679 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1680 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1681 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1682 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001683 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1684 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1685 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1686 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1687 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1688 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1689 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001690
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001691- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1692 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1693
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001694- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1695 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1696 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1697 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1698 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1699 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1700 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1701 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1702 to Zack Weinberg!
1703
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001704- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1705 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1706 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1707 type. This has been fixed now.
1708
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001709- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1710 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1711 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1712
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001713- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1714 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1715 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1716 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1717 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1718 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1719 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1720 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001721 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001722
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001723- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1724 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1725 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001726
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001727- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1728 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1729 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1730 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1731 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1732 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1733 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1734 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001735 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001736 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1737 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1738
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001739- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1740 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1741 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1742 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1743 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1744 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1745 this.)
1746
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001747- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1748 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001749 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001750 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001751 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1752 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001753 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1754 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001755
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001756- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1757 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1758 currently running.
1759
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001760- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1761 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1762 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1763 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1764
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001765- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1766 as directory names.
1767
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001768- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1769 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1770
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001771- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1772 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1773
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001774- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001775 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1776 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001777
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001778- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1779 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1780 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1781 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1782 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1783
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001784- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1785 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1786 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1787 removed.
1788
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001789- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1790 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1791 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1792
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001793- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1794 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1795 to __debug__.
1796
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001797- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1798 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1799 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1800
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001801- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1802 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1803 deprecated now.
1804
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001805- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1806 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1807 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001808
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001809- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1810 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1811 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1812 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1813 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001814
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001815- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1816 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1817
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001818- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1819 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1820 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001821 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001822 is backward compatible.
1823
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001824- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1825 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1826 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1827 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1828 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1829
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001830- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1831 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1832 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1833 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1834 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1835 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001836
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001837- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1838 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1839
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001840- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1841 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1842
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001843- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1844 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1845 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1846 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1847 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1848
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001849- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1850 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1851 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1852
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001853- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001854 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1855
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001856- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1857 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1858 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001859
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001860- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1861 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1862
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001863- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1864 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1865 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1866
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001867- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1868
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001869Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001870-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001871
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001872- Added three operators to the operator module:
1873 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1874 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1875 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1876
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001877- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1878
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001879- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1880 archives.
1881
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001882- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1883 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1884 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1885
1886 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1887
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001888- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1889 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1890 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001891 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001892
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001893- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1894 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1895 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1896 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001897 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1898 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1899 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1900 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001901
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001902- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1903 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001904
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001905- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1906
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001907- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1908 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1909
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001910- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1911 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1912 supported.
1913
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001914- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1915
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001916- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1917 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001918
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001919- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1920 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1921
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001922- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1923
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001924- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1925 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1926
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001927- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1928 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1929 functions but callable type objects.
1930
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001931- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001932 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001933 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001934
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001935- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1936 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001937
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001938- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1939 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001940
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001941- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1942 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1943 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1944 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1945
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001946- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1947 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001948
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001949- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1950 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1951 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1952 and __imul__.
1953
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001954- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001955 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1956 is called.
1957
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001958- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1959 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1960 interpreter was compiled.
1961
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001962- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1963 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1964 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001965 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001966 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1967 1, not 2.
1968
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001969- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1970 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1971 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1972 limit.
1973
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001974- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1975 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1976 bug #623464.
1977
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001978- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1979 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1980 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1981 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1982
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001983Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001984-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001985
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001986- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1987
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001988- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1989 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1990 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1991 with Python 2.3a2.
1992
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001993- os.path exposes getctime.
1994
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001995- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001996 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001997 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001998 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001999 unit tests of floating point results.
2000
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002001- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2002 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2003 has been increased.
2004
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002005- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2006 executed.
2007
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002008- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2009 postinstallation script.
2010
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002011- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2012 test the current module.
2013
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002014- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002015 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2016 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2017 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2018 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2019
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002020- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002021 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002022 Ward's Optik package.
2023
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002024- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2025 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2026 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2027 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2028
2029- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2030 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002031 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002032
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002033- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2034 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2035 shelf are binary pickles.
2036
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002037- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2038 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2039
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002040- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2041 modules are iterators now.
2042
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002043- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2044 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2045 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2046 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2047 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2048 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002049
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002050- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2051 with their entity value.
2052
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002053- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2054
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002055- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2056 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002057
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002058- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2059 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002060 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002061
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002062- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2063 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2064 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2065 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2066 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2067 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2068 main():
2069
2070 import locale
2071 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2072
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002073- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2074 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2075
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002076- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2077 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2078 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2079 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2080 to the new standard.
2081
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002082- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2083 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2084 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2085 an extension to the database.
2086
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002087- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2088 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2089 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2090 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002091 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002092
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002093- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002094 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002095
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002096- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2097 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2098 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2099 bounded integers.
2100
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002101- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2102 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2103 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2104 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2105 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2106 in existence.
2107
2108 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2109 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2110 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2111 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2112 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2113 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2114
2115 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2116 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2117 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2118 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2119
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002120- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2121 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2122 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2123
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002124- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2125
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002126- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2127 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2128 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2129 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2130
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002131- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2132 argument.
2133
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002134- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2135 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2136 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2137 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2138 [SF patch 560794].
2139
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002140- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2141 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2142 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002143 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2144 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2145 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002146
2147- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2148 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002149
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002150- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2151 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2152 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2153 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002154
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002155- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2156 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2157 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2158 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2159 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2160
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002161- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002162
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002163- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2164
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002165- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2166 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2167 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2168 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2169 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2170 identical to None.
2171
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002172- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2173 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2174 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2175 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2176 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2177 results now.
2178
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002179- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2180 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2181
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002182- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2183 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2184 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2185 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2186 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2187 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2188 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2189 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2190
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002191- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2192
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002193- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2194 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2195
2196- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2197 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2198 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2199 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2200 and other systems.
2201
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002202- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2203 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2204 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2205 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 +00002206 work well with these.
2207
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002208- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2209
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002210- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002211 connections.
2212
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002213- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2214 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2215 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2216
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002217- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2218 sets
2219
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002220- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2221 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2222 name.
2223
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002224- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2225 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2226 passed in.
2227
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002228- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002229 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002230 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2231 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002232
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002233- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2234
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002235- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2236
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002237- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2238 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2239 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2240
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002241- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2242 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2243 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2244 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002245 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002246
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002247- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002248 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002249 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002250
2251- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2252 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2253 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2254
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002255- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002256 the value of its expression argument.
2257
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002258- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2259 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2260 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2261
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002262- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2263 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2264 skipstone browser was included.
2265
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002266- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2267 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2268
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002269Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002270-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002271
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002272- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2273 names in addition to accepting file names.
2274
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002275- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2276 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2277 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2278 still used and useful.)
2279
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002280- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2281 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2282 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2283 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002284
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002285- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2286 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2287 the generated binary.
2288
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002289Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002290-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002291
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002292- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2293
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002294- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2295 except in the hands of experts.
2296
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002297- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002298 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2299 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2300 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002301
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002302- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2303 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2304 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2305 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2306 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2307 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2308 builds.
2309
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002310- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2311 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2312 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2313 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2314 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2315 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2316 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2317 new type.
2318
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002319- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002320
2321 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2322 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2323 positive infinities.
2324
2325 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2326 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2327 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2328 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2329 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2330 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2331 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2332
2333 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2334
2335 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2336
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002337- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2338 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2339 size of the executable.
2340
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002341- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2342 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2343 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2344 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002345
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002346- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2347
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002348- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2349 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2350 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002351
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002352- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2353 well as Unix.
2354
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002355- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2356 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2357 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2358 modules in the README file for details.
2359
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002360C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002361-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002362
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002363- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2364 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002365 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002366 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002367 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002368
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002369- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2370 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2371 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2372 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2373 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2374 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002375 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002376 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2377 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2378 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2379 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2380 aligned.)
2381
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002382- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2383 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2384 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2385
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002386- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2387 level.
2388
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002389- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2390 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2391 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2392 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2393 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2394
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002395- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2396 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2397 code.
2398
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002399- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2400 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2401 adjusting for negative indices.
2402
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002403- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2404 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2405 object.
2406
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002407- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2408 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2409 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2410
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002411- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2412 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002413
2414- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2415
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002416- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2417 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2418 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2419 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2420
2421- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2422
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002423- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002424
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002425- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002426 without going through the buffer API.
2427
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002428- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002429
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002430- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2431 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2432 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2433 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2434
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002435- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2436 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2437
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002438- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002439 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2440
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002441New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002442-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002443
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002444- OpenVMS is now supported.
2445
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002446- AtheOS is now supported.
2447
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002448- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2449
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002450- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2451
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002452Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002453-----
2454
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002455- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2456 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2457 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002458
2459Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002460-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002461
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002462- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2463 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2464 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2465 bugs.
2466 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002467 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002468 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2469 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002470 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002471
2472- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002473 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002474
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002475- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2476 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2477
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002478- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2479 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002480 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002481 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2482
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002483- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2484 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2485 use files" uninstall option).
2486
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002487- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2488
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002489- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2490 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2491
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002492- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2493 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2494 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2495
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002496- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2497 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2498 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2499 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2500 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002501 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2502 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2503 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002504
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002505- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002506 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002507 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2508 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2509 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2510 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2511 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2512 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2513 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2514 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2515 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2516 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2517 work around.
2518
2519- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2520 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2521 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2522 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2523 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2524 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2525 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2526 specified with O_CREAT too).
2527
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002528Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002529----
2530
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002531- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002532
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002533- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2534 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2535 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2536
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002537- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2538 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2539 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2540
2541- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2542 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2543 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2544 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2545 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2546 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2547 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2548 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002549
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002550- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2551 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2552 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002553
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002554- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2555 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2556 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2557 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2558 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002559
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002560- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2561 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2562 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002563
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002564- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2565 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002566
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002567- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2568 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2569 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2570 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2571 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002572
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002573- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2574 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2575 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2576
2577- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2578 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2579 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002580
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002581- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2582 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2583 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2584 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002585 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002586
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002587- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2588 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002589
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002590- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2591 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002592
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002593- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002594 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002595 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2596 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002597
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002598
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002599What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002600===============================
2601
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002602*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2603
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002604Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002605--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002606
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002607- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2608 with a custom metaclass.
2609
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002610Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002611-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002612
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002613- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2614 are proxies.
2615
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002616Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002617-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002618
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002619- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2620 very short strings.
2621
2622- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2623 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2624 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2625 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2626 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2627
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002628Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002629-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002630
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002631- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2632 close or delete time).
2633
2634- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2635 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2636
2637- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2638
2639- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002640 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002641
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002642Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002643-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002644
2645Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002646-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002647
2648C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002649-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002650
2651New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002652-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002653
2654Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002655-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002656
2657Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002658-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002659
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002660- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2661
2662- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2663 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2664
2665- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2666 deleted at process exit time.
2667
2668- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2669 in backslash.
2670
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002671Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002672----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002673
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002674- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2675 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2676 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2677
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002678
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002679What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002680===========================
2681
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002682*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2683
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002684Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002685--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002686
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002687- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2688 been extensively updated. See
2689
2690 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2691
2692 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2693
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002694- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2695 deleted!
2696
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002697- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2698 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2699 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2700 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2701 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2702
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002703- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2704
2705 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2706 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2707
2708 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2709 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2710 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2711 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2712 supported anyway.
2713
2714 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2715 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2716
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002717- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2718 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2719 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2720 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2721 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002722
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002723- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2724 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2725 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2726
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002727Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002728-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002729
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002730- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2731 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2732 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2733 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2734 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2735 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002736 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2737 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2738 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2739 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002740
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002741- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2742 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2743 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2744
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002745Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002746-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002747
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002748- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2749
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002750Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002751-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002752
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002753- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2754 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2755 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2756 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2757 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2758 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2759
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002760- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2761
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002762- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2763
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002764- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2765
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002766- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2767 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2768 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2769
2770- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2771
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002772Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002773-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002774
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002775- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2776 off a search on Google.
2777
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002778Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002779-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002780
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002781- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2782 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2783 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2784 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2785 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2786 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2787 other platforms should do likewise.
2788
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002789- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2790 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2791 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2792
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002793C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002794-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002795
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002796- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2797 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2798 producing key-value pairs.
2799
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002800- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002801 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002802 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2803 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2804 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2805 previously went unchallenged.
2806
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002807New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002808-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002809
2810Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002811-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002812
2813Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002814-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002815
2816Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002817----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002818
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002819- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2820 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002821
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002822- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2823 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2824 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2825 home.
2826
2827
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002828What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002829===========================
2830
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002831*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2832
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002833Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002834--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002835
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002836- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2837 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002838
2839 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002840 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002841
2842 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2843 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002844 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002845 This needs to be documented.
2846
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002847- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2848 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2849
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002850- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2851 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2852 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2853
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002854- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2855 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2856
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002857- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2858 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2859 class forbids it).
2860
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002861- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2862 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2863 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2864
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002865- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2866
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002867Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002868-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002869
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002870- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2871 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002872 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002873
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002874- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2875 (like 1 + '').
2876
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002877Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002878-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002879
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002880- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2881 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2882 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2883 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002884 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002885 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2886
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002887- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2888 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2889 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2890 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2891
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002892- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2893 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002894 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2895 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2896 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002897
2898- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2899 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002900
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002901- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2902 bytes on its input.
2903
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002904Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002905-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002906
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002907- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002908 convenience function.
2909
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002910- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2911 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2912 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002913 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2914 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2915 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2916 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2917 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2918 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002919
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002920- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2921 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2922 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2923 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2924
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002925- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2926 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2927 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2928
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002929- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2930 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2931 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2932 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2933
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002934- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2935 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002936 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002937 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2938 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2939 new -l and -e options.
2940
2941- statcache is now deprecated.
2942
2943- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2944 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002945 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002946 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2947 time properly taken into account.
2948
2949- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2950 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2951 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2952 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2953
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002954Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002955-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002956
2957Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002958-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002959
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002960- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2961 is built with libdb3 if available.
2962
2963- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2964
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002965C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002966-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002967
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002968- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2969 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2970 PySequence_Size().
2971
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002972- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2973
2974- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2975 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2976 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2977
2978- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2979 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2980
2981- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2982 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2983
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002984New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002985-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002986
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002987- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2988 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2989
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002990- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2991 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2992
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002993- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2994
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002995Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002996-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002997
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002998- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2999 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3000
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003001Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003002-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003003
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003004Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003005----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003006
3007- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3008 removed completely in the next release.
3009
3010- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3011 OSX.
3012
3013- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3014 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3015
3016- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3017
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003018
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003019What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003020===========================
3021
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003022*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3023
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003024Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003025--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003026
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003027- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003028 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003029 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003030 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3031 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003032 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3033 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003034 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3035 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003036
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003037- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3038 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3039
3040- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3041 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3042
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003043Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003044-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003045
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003046- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3047 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3048 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3049 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3050 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3051 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3052 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3053 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3054
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003055- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3056 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3057 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3058 example).
3059
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003060- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003061 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003062 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003063 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003064
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003065- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3066 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3067 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003068 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003069
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003070- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3071 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3072 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3073 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3074 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3075 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3076
3077 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3078
3079 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3080
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003081Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003082-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003083
3084- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3085
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003086- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3087
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003088- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3089 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003090
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003091- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3092 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3093 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3094 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3095 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3096 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003097 attributes.
3098
3099- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3100 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3101 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003102
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003103- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3104 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3105 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003106
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003107- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3108 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3109 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003110 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3111 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3112
3113- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3114 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003115
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003116Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003117-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003118
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003119- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3120 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3121
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003122- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3123 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3124 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3125 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3126
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003127- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3128 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3129 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3130 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3131
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003132 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3133 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3134 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3135 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3136 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3137 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3138 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3139 without losing information).
3140
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003141- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003142 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3143 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3144 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3145 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3146 module).
3147
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003148 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003149 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3150 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3151 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3152 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003153
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003154- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003155 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3156 encoding.
3157
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003158- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3159 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3160
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003161- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003162 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3163
3164- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3165 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3166 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3167 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3168
3169- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3170
3171- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3172 ON, and OFF.
3173
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003174- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3175 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3176
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003177Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003178-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003179
3180- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3181 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3182 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003183
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003184- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3185 been added: -X and -E.
3186
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003187Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003188-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003189
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003190- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3191 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3192
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003193C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003194-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003195
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003196- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3197 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3198 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3199 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3200 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3201
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003202- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3203 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3204 as long) arguments.
3205
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003206- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3207 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3208 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3209 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3210 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3211 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3212
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003213- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3214 input.
3215
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003216New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003217-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003218
3219Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003220-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003221
3222Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003223-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003224
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003225- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3226 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3227 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3228
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003229- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3230 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3231 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003232 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003233
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003234 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3235 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3236 import signal
3237 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003238
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003239 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003240 while 1:
3241 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003242 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003243 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3244 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3245 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3246 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003247
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003248
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003249What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3250===========================
3251
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003252*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3253
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003254Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003255--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003256
3257- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3258 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3259 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3260
3261- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3262 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3263 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3264 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3265 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3266 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3267 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003268
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003269- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003270 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003271 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3272 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3273 associate a docstring with a property.
3274
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003275- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3276 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3277 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3278 other built-in object types.
3279
3280- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3281 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3282 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3283 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3284 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3285
3286- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3287 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3288
3289- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3290 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003291 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003292 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3293 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3294 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3295 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3296 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3297
3298- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3299 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3300 class.
3301
3302- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3303 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3304 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3305 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3306
3307- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3308 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3309 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3310 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3311
3312- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3313 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3314
3315- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3316 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3317 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3318 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3319 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003320 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003321 with the same value as s.
3322
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003323- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3324
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003325Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003326----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003327
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003328- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3329
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003330- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3331 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3332 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3333 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3334 objects.
3335
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003336- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3337 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003338 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3339 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3340
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003341- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3342 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3343 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3344
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003345Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003346-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003347
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003348- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3349 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3350 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3351 by the instances.
3352
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003353- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3354 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3355 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3356
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003357- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3358 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3359 before the entire comparison is complete.
3360
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003361- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3362 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3363 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3364
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003365- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3366 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3367 getwriter().
3368
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003369- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3370 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3371
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003372- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003373 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3374 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3375
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003376- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3377 iterable object.
3378
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003379- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3380 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003381
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003382- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3383 authentication.
3384
3385- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3386 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003387
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003388- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003389 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3390 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3391 a sample driver.)
3392
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003393Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003394-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003395
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003396- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3397 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3398 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3399 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3400 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3401 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3402 kernel has large file support.
3403
3404- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3405 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3406 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3407 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3408 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3409
3410- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3411 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3412 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3413
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003414C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003415-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003416
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003417- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3418 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3419
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003420New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003421-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003422
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003423- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3424 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3425
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003426Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003427-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003428
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003429- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3430 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3431 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3432 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3433 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3434
3435- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3436 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3437 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3438 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3439
3440- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3441 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3442
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003443Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003444-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003445
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003446- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003447 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3448 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003449
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003450
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003451What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3452===========================
3453
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003454*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3455
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003456Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003457----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003458
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003459- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3460 big to represent as a C double.
3461
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003462- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3463 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3464 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3465 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3466 restriction).
3467
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003468- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3469 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3470 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3471 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3472 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3473
3474 >>> dir([])
3475 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3476 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3477 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3478 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3479 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3480 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3481 'reverse', 'sort']
3482
3483 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3484
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003485- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003486 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3487 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3488 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3489 OverflowError exception.
3490
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003491- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003492 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003493 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3494 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3495 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3496 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3497 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003498 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003499 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3500 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3501
3502 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3503 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3504 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3505 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003506
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003507- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003508 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3509 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3510 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3511 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3512 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3513 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3514 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3515 once it is created.
3516
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003517- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3518 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3519 (key, value) pairs.
3520
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003521- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003522 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3523 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3524
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003525- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3526 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3527 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3528 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3529 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003530
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003531- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003532 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3533 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3534
3535 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3536
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003537- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003538 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3539
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003540Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003541-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003542
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003543- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003544 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3545 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003546
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003547- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3548 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3549 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3550 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3551 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3552 in this area anymore).
3553
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003554- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3555 threading.Timer.
3556
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003557- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3558 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3559
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003560- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003561 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3562
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003563- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003564 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3565 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3566 converted to Python longs.
3567
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003568- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003569 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3570
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003571- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3572 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3573 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3574
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003575Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003576-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003577
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003578- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3579 division operators as per PEP 238.
3580
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003581Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003582-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003583
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003584- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3585 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3586 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3587 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3588
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003589C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003590-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003591
3592- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003593
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003594- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3595 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003596 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003597
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003598 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3599 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003600 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003601 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003602
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003603- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003604 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3605 module:
3606
3607 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003608
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003609 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3610 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003611
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003612 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3613 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003614
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003615 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3616
3617 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3618
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003619- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003620 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3621 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3622 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003623
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003624New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003625-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003626
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003627- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3628 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3629 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3630 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3631 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003632
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003633Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003634-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003635
3636Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003637-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003638
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003639- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3640 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3641 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3642 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003643 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3644 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3645 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3646 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3647 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003648
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003649- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003650 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3651
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003652
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003653What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3654===========================
3655
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003656*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3657
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003658Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003659-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003660
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003661- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3662 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3663
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003664- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3665 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3666 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003667
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003668- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3669 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3670 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3671 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003672
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003673- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3674
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003675- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003676
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003677Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003678-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003679
3680- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003681 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003682 the module docstring for details.
3683
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003684Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003685-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003686
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003687- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003688 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3689 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3690 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003691
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003692- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3693 Nick Mathewson.
3694
3695Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003696----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003697
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003698- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3699 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3700 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3701 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3702 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3703 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3704 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3705 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3706
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003707- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3708 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3709 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3710 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3711
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003712- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3713 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3714 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3715 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3716 come a long way).
3717
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003718- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3719 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3720 write filters for these warnings).
3721
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003722- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3723 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3724 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3725 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3726 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3727
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003728- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3729 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3730 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3731 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3732 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3733 older distribution.
3734
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003735Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003736-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003737
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003738- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3739 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003740 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003741
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003742- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3743 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3744 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3745
3746- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3747
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003748- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3749
3750- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3751
3752- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3753
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003754- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003755
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003756- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3757
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003758New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003759-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003760
3761C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003762-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003763
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003764- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3765 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3766 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3767 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3768 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3769 against buffer overruns.
3770
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003771- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003772 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3773 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003774 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3775 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3776 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3777
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003778- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3779 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3780 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3781 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3782 deprecated.
3783
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003784Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003785-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003786
3787- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3788 relevant is found.
3789
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003790
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003791What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003792===========================
3793
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003794*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3795
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003796Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003797----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003798
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003799- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3800 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3801 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3802 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3803 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3804 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3805 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3806 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003807 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003808 repaired.
3809
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003810- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003811 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003812 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3813 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3814 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3815 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3816 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3817 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3818 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3819 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3820
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003821- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3822 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3823 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3824 leading BMO character).
3825
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003826- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3827 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3828 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3829
3830 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3831 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3832 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003833
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003834 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3835 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3836 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3837 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3838 for various simple to use conversions.
3839
3840 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3841 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3842
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003843 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3844 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3845 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3846 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3847 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3848 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3849 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3850 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3851 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3852 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3853 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3854 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3855 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3856 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3857 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003858
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003859- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3860 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3861 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003862 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003863 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003864
3865 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003866 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3867 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3868 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3869 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3870 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003871 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3872 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003873
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003874 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3875 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3876 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003877 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003878
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003879- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3880 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3881 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3882 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3883 floating arithmetic,
3884
3885 x = 9007199254740992.0
3886 print long(x)
3887
3888 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3889 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3890 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3891 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3892 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3893 functions are of good quality).
3894
3895 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3896 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3897 algorithms to break.
3898
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003899- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3900 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3901 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3902 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3903 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3904 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3905 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3906 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3907 order.
3908
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003909- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3910 operation along the most common code paths.
3911
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003912- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3913 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3914
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003915- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3916 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3917 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3918 {}.update(UserDict())
3919
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003920- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3921 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3922 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3923 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3924 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3925 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3926 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3927 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3928
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003929- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003930 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003931
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003932 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003933 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3934 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003935 join() method of strings
3936 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003937 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3938 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003939 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003940 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003941
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003942- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3943 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3944
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003945- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3946 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3947
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003948- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3949 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3950 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3951 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3952
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003953- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3954 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003955 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003956 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3957 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003958
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003959- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3960
3961
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003962Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003963-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003964
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003965- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003966 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003967 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3968 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3969
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003970- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3971 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3972
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003973- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3974 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3975 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3976 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3977
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003978- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3979 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3980 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3981
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003982- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3983
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003984- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3985
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003986- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3987 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3988 that are still imported into string.py).
3989
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003990- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3991
3992- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3993 Now it does.
3994
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003995- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3996
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003997- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3998 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3999 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4000 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4001 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004002 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4003 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004004
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004005- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4006 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4007 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4008 'help(object)'.
4009
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004010Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004011-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004012
4013- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004014 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004015 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4016 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4017
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004018- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004019 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4020 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004021
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004022C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004023-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004024
4025- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4026 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004027
4028----
4029
4030**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**