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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +000015- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
16 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
17 modified the list.
18
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +000019- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
20 functions is now writable.
21
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +000022- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
23 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
24 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
25 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
26
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000027- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
28 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
29 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
30 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
31 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000032
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +000033- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
34 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
35
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000036Extension modules
37-----------------
38
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +000039- Added socket.socketpair().
40
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000041Library
42-------
43
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +000044- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
45 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
46
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +000047- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
48 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
49 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
50
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000051- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
52 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
53 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
54 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
55 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
56 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
57 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
58 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
59 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
60 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
61 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
62 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
63 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
64
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000065Tools/Demos
66-----------
67
68Build
69-----
70
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +000071- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
72 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
73
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000074C API
75-----
76
77Documentation
78-------------
79
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +000080- bug 990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if it contains
81symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment since 1992, but is now in
82the library reference as well.
83
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000084New platforms
85-------------
86
87Tests
88-----
89
90Windows
91-------
92
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +000093- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
94 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
95 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
96 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
97 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
98 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
99 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
100 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
101 the problem.
102
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000103Mac
104---
105
106
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000107What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
108=================================
109
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000110*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000111
112Core and builtins
113-----------------
114
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000115- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
116 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
117 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
118 sensitive code.
119
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000120- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
121 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
122 @staticmethod
123 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000124 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000125
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000126- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
127 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
128 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
129 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
130 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
131 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
132 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
133 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
134 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
135 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
136 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
137
138 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
139 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
140 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
141 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
142 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
143 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
144 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
145
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000146- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
147 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
148
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000149- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000150 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000151
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000152- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000153 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000154 which was missing for no apparent reason.
155
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000156- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000157 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
158 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
159
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000160- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
161 types that support garbage collection.
162
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000163- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
164
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000165- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
166 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
167 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
168 Jython.
169
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000170- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
171
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000172- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
173 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
174
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000175- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
176 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
177 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000178
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000179- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
180 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
181 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
182
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000183Extension modules
184-----------------
185
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000186- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
187
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000188Library
189-------
190
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000191- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
192 TIS-620
193
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000194- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
195 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
196 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
197 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
198 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
199 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
200 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
201 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
202 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
203 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
204
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000205- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
206
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000207- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
208 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
209 same as when the argument is omitted).
210 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
211
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000212- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
213
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000214- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
215 schemes are offered.
216
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000217- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
218
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000219- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
220 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
221 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
222
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000223- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
224
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000225- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
226 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
227
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000228- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
229 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
230 when dummy_threading is being used.
231
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000232- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
233 from a tarfile.
234
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000235- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000236 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000237
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000238- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
239 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
240 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
241 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
242
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000243- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
244 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
245
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000246- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
247 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
248 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
249 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
250 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
251 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
252 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
253 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
254 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
255 by some other method in progress).
256
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000257- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
258 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
259 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000260
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000261- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
262
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000263- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
264 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
265 AM Kuchling.
266
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000267- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
268 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
269 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
270
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000271- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
272 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
273 instead of unsigned.
274
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000275- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000276 no longer part of the public API.
277
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000278- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
279 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
280 string methods of the same name).
281
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000282- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000283 SF patch 945642.
284
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000285- doctest unittest integration improvements:
286
287 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
288
289 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
290 DocTestSuites.
291
292- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
293 that provide thread-local data.
294
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000295- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
296 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
297
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000298- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
299
300- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
301 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
302 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
303
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000304- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
305
306 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
307 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
308 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000309
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000310 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
311 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
312 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
313 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
314
315 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
316 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
317
318 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
319 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
320 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
321 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
322
323 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
324 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
325 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
326 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
327 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
328
329 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
330 wrapping help output.
331
332 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
333 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
334 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000335
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000336C API
337-----
338
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000339- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
340 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
341 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
342 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
343 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
344 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
345 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
346 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
347 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
348 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
349 its visible semantics have not changed.
350
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000351- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
352 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
353
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000354Documentation
355-------------
356
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000357- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000358
359 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000360 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000361
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000362 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000363
364 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
365
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000366- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000367
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000368Tests
369-----
370
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000371- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000372 platforms that use the Makefile.
373
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000374- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
375 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
376 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
377
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000378
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000379What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
380=================================
381
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000382*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000383
384Core and builtins
385-----------------
386
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000387- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
388 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
389 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
390 objects now (one object instead of three).
391
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000392- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
393 Windows DLLs.
394
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000395- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
396 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000397
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000398- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
399 a new .pyc magic.
400
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000401- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
402 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
403 be there.
404
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000405- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
406 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
407 the LC_NUMERIC category.
408
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000409- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
410 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
411 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
412
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000413- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
414
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000415- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
416 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
417 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000418
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000419- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
420 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
421
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000422- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
423
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000424- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000425 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000426
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000427- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
428
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000429- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
430
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000431- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
432 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
433
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000434- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
435 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
436 Fixes bug #858016 .
437
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000438- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
439 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
440 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
441
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000442- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
443 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
444 improves their performance (about 35%).
445
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000446- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
447 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
448 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
449
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000450- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
451 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
452 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
453 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
454
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000455- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
456 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
457 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
458 length is not known).
459
460- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
461 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000462 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
463 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000464 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
465
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000466- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
467 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
468
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000469- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
470 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
471 keyword arguments.
472
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000473- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
474 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
475 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
476
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000477- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
478 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
479 cases.
480
481- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
482 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
483 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
484 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
485 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
486 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
487 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
488 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
489 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
490 a release build.
491
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000492- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
493 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
494
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000495- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000496 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000497
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000498- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
499 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
500 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
501 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
502 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
503 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
504 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
505 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
506 destroyed.
507
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000508- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
509 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
510 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
511 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
512 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
513 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
514 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
515 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
516
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000517- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
518 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
519 character other than a space.
520
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000521- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
522 by the function object or by the method object, the function
523 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
524 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
525 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
526 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
527 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
528 attributes with the same name.
529
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000530- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
531 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
532 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
533 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
534 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
535 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
536 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
537 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
538 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
539 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
540 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
541 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
542 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
543 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000544
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000545- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
546 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
547 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
548 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
549 This has been repaired.
550
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000551- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
552
553- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
554
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000555- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
556 over a sequence.
557
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000558- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000559 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000560
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000561- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
562
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000563- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
564 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
565 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
566 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
567 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
568 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
569 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
570 records with equal keys is unchanged).
571
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000572- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
573 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
574 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
575
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000576- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
577 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
578 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
579 freelist.
580
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000581- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
582 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
583
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000584- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
585 number.
586
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000587- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
588 a TypeError exception.
589
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000590- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
591 820195.
592
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000593- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
594 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
595 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
596
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000597- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000598 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
599 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000600
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000601- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
602 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
603 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
604
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000605- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
606 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000607 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000608
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000609- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000610 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
611 the first call.
612
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000613
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000614Extension modules
615-----------------
616
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000617- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
618 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
619
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000620- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
621 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
622 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
623 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
624 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
625 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
626 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000627
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000628- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
629
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000630- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
631
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000632- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
633 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
634
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000635- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
636 fewer false positives.
637
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000638- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
639 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
640
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000641- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000642 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
643
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000644- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000645 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000646 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
647 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
648 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000649
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000650- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
651 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
652 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
653 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
654
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000655- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
656 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
657 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
658 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
659 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
660 #897625.
661
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000662- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
663 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
664
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000665- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
666 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
667 and pops on either side of the deque.
668
669- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
670 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
671
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000672- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
673 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
674 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
675 other functions that expect a function argument.
676
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000677- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
678
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000679- os.getsid was added.
680
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000681- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
682 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
683 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
684
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000685- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
686
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000687- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
688
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000689- readline.clear_history was added.
690
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000691- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
692
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000693- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
694
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000695- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
696
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000697- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
698
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000699- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
700
701- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
702
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000703- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
704
705- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
706
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000707- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
708 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
709 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
710
711- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
712 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
713 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
714 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
715 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
716 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
717 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
718
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000719- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
720 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
721 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
722 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000723
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000724- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000725 iterators from a single iterable.
726
727- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
728 of raising a TypeError exception.
729
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000730- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
731 as parameter.
732
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000733Library
734-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000735
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000736- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
737 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
738 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000739
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000740- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
741 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
742 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000743
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000744- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000745
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000746- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
747 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000748
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000749- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
750 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
751
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000752- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
753
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000754- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000755 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000756
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000757- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
758 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
759
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000760- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
761
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000762- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
763 on cygwin and mingw32.
764
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000765- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
766
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000767- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
768 module.
769
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000770- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
771 installation scheme for all platforms.
772
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000773- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000774 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000775
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000776- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
777 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
778 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
779
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000780- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
781 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
782 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
783
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000784- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
785
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000786- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
787
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000788- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
789 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
790
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000791- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
792 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
793 type pattern with the same value exists.
794
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000795- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
796 when run from the command prompt).
797
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000798- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
799 not taken into consideration when caching value.
800
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000801- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
802 default sort).
803
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000804- Added global runctx function to profile module
805
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000806- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
807
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000808- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
809
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000810- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
811
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000812- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000813 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
814 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
815 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
816 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
817 accordingly.
818
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000819- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
820 decoding standards.
821
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000822- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
823 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
824 called for all requests.
825
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000826- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
827 they are passed to the compiler.
828
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000829- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
830 indent, width and depth.
831
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000832- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
833 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
834
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000835- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
836 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
837
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000838- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
839
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000840- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
841
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000842- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
843
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000844- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
845 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
846
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000847- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000848 for better performance.
849
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000850- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000851
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000852- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
853 a string).
854
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000855- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
856
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000857- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
858
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000859- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
860
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000861- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
862
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000863- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
864 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
865 list of fieldnames.
866
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000867- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
868 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
869
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000870- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
871
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000872- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
873 empty lists.
874
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000875- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
876 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
877 and shelves.
878
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000879- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
880 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
881
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000882- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000883 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
884 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000885
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000886- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
887 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000888 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000889
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000890- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000891 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
892 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
893
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000894- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
895 and removed in Py2.4.
896
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000897- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
898
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000899- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
900
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000901Tools/Demos
902-----------
903
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000904- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
905 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
906
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000907- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
908
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000909- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
910 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
911 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
912 destination in situations where both files are given.
913
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000914- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
915 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
916 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
917 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
918
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000919- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
920
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000921- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
922 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
923 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
924 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
925 now.
926
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000927- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
928 in effect
929
930- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
931 C-c C-h
932
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000933- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
934 -d option was given.
935
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000936Build
937-----
938
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000939- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
940 build under OS X.
941
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000942- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
943 --enable-profiling.
944
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000945- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
946 is configured --with-tsc.
947
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000948- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
949 on AMD64.
950
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000951- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
952 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
953
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000954- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
955 removed.
956
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000957- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
958 supported (see PEP 11).
959
960- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
961
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000962- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
963
964- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
965 (see PEP 11).
966
967- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
968 sizeof(char) must be 1.
969
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000970C API
971-----
972
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000973- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
974 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
975 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
976
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000977- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
978 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
979 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
980 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
981
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000982- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
983 generator objects.
984
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000985- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
986 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000987 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
988 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000989
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000990- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
991 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
992
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000993- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
994 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
995 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
996 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
997 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
998
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000999- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1000 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1001 about 10% faster.
1002
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001003- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1004 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1005
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001006- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1007 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1008 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1009 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1010
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001011Windows
1012-------
1013
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001014- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1015 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1016 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1017 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1018
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001019- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1020 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1021 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1022
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001023
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001024What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1025===============================
1026
1027*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1028
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001029IDLE
1030----
1031
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001032- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1033 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1034 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1035 context-menu actions.
1036
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001037- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1038 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1039 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1040 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1041 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1042 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1043 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1044 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1045 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1046
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001047
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001048What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1049=============================================
1050
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001051*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001052
1053Core and builtins
1054-----------------
1055
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001056- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001057 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001058 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1059
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001060Extension modules
1061-----------------
1062
1063- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1064 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1065 than once. This has been fixed.
1066
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001067- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1068 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1069 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1070 call.
1071
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001072- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1073
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001074Library
1075-------
1076
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001077- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1078 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1079
1080- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1081 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1082 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1083 restored.
1084
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001085IDLE
1086----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001087
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001088- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001089
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001090Build
1091-----
1092
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001093- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1094 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1095
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001096C API
1097-----
1098
1099Windows
1100-------
1101
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001102- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1103 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1104
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001105- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1106
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001107Mac
1108---
1109
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001110- Various fixes to pimp.
1111
1112- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1113
1114- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1115 more problems than it solves.
1116
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001117
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001118What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1119=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001120
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001121*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1122
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001123Core and builtins
1124-----------------
1125
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001126- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1127 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1128
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001129- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1130 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001131 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001132
1133- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1134 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1135 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001136 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001137
1138- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1139 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001140
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001141- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1142 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1143 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1144
1145- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001146 770247.
1147
1148- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001149
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001150Extension modules
1151-----------------
1152
1153- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1154 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1155
1156- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1157
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001158- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1159
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001160- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1161 contained within the _strptime module.
1162
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001163- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1164 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1165
1166- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001167 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1168
1169- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1170 the find_class attribute, if present.
1171
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001172- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001173
1174 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1175 (SF bug 763298).
1176
1177 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001178 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1179 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1180 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001181
1182 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1183
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001184Library
1185-------
1186
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001187- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1188
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001189- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1190 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1191 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1192 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1193 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1194 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1195 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1196 or Tester().
1197
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001198- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1199 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1200 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1201 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1202 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1203 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1204 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1205 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1206 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001207
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001208 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001209
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001210- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1211 weren't before was an oversight.
1212
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001213- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1214 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1215
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001216- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1217 when there are no lines.
1218
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001219- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1220 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1221
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001222- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1223 to child processes.
1224
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001225- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1226
1227- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1228
1229- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1230 xmlrpclib.
1231
1232- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1233 responses.
1234
1235- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1236 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1237
1238- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1239 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1240 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1241
1242- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1243 used as patterns.
1244
1245- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1246 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1247 than Tk 8.3.
1248
1249- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1250
1251- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001252
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001253Tools/Demos
1254-----------
1255
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001256- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1257
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001258- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1259
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001260- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001261
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001262Build
1263-----
1264
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001265- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1266
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001267- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1268
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001269- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1270 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001271
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001272- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1273 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1274 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001275
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001276C API
1277-----
1278
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001279- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1280 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1281
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001282Windows
1283-------
1284
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001285- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1286 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1287 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1288 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1289 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1290 Python exception ::
1291
1292 thread.error: can't start new thread
1293
1294 is raised now.
1295
1296- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1297 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1298 instead of from DLL teardown.
1299
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001300Mac
1301---
1302
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001303- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001304 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001305 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1306 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1307 the executable in the bundle.
1308
1309- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001310
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001311- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1312
1313- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1314 on Panther.
1315
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001316What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1317================================
1318
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001319*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001320
1321Core and builtins
1322-----------------
1323
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001324- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1325 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1326 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1327 with the -i option.
1328
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001329- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1330 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1331
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001332- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1333 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1334
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001335- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1336 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1337 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1338 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1339 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1340 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1341 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1342 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1343 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1344 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1345 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1346 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1347 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001348
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001349- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1350 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1351 embedded in a lambda expression.
1352
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001353- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1354 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1355 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1356 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1357 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1358
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001359- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1360 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1361 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1362
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001363- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1364 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1365
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001366- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1367 It's writable again.
1368
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001369- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1370 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1371 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001372 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001373
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001374- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1375 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1376 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1377
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001378Extension modules
1379-----------------
1380
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001381- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1382 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1383
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001384- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1385 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1386 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1387 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1388
1389- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1390 collection.
1391
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001392- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1393 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1394 unique within a single program run.
1395
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001396- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1397 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1398
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001399- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1400 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1401
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001402- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1403 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001404
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001405- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1406
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001407- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1408 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1409
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001410- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1411 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1412 for many BSD-derived systems.
1413
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001414
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001415Library
1416-------
1417
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001418- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1419 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1420 primary ones:
1421
1422 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1423 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1424 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1425
1426 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1427 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1428 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1429 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1430 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1431 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1432
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001433- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1434 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1435 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1436 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1437 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1438 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1439 argument.
1440
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001441- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1442 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1443 in the archive.
1444
1445- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1446 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1447
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001448- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1449 569574).
1450
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001451- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1452 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1453 no more.
1454
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001455- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1456 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1457 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1458 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1459 code coverage.
1460
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001461- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1462 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1463 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001464 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1465 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001466
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001467- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1468 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1469 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001470 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001471
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001472- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1473
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001474- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1475 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1476 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1477 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1478
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001479- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1480 handling.
1481
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001482- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1483 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1484
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001485- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1486 in socket.py.
1487
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001488- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1489
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001490- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1491 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1492 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1493 opener with proxy support.
1494
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001495- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1496
1497- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1498
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001499Tools/Demos
1500-----------
1501
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001502- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1503
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001504- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1505
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001506- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1507 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001508
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001509- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1510 files.
1511
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001512Build
1513-----
1514
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001515- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001516 different root directory.
1517
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001518C API
1519-----
1520
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001521- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1522 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1523 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1524 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1525 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1526 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1527 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1528 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1529 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1530 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1531
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001532- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1533 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1534 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1535 from Python.
1536
1537
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001538New platforms
1539-------------
1540
1541None this time.
1542
1543Tests
1544-----
1545
1546- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1547 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1548
1549Windows
1550-------
1551
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001552- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1553
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001554- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1555 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1556 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1557 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1558 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1559 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1560 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1561 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1562 that's what it's for.
1563
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001564Mac
1565---
1566
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001567- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1568 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1569 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1570 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001571- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1572 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1573- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001574
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001575SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1576------------------------------------
1577
1578430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1579598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1580622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1581661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1582683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1583697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1584713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1585724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1586727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1587729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1588730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1589731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1590732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1591733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1592735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1593740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1594744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1595745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1596747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1597749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1598751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1599753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1600755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1601757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1602760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1603
1604
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001605What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1606================================
1607
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001608*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001609
1610Core and builtins
1611-----------------
1612
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001613- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1614 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1615
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001616- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1617 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1618 and cannot be strings).
1619
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001620- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1621 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1622 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1623 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1624
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001625- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1626 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1627 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1628 Python itself.
1629
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001630- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1631 the referenced object, if it has one.
1632
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001633- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1634 the thread started at
1635 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1636
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001637- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1638 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1639 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1640 placed on a list index.
1641
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001642- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1643 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1644 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1645 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1646
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001647- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1648 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1649 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1650 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1651 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1652 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1653 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1654
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001655- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1656 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1657 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1658 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1659 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1660
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001661- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1662 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001663
1664- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1665 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1666 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1667 #693195.)
1668
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001669- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1670 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001671
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001672- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001673 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001674 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1675 interpreter executions, would fail.
1676
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001677- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001678 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001679 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001680
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001681Extension modules
1682-----------------
1683
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001684- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1685 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1686 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1687 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1688
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001689- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1690 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1691
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001692- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1693 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1694 and Greg Chapman.)
1695
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001696- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1697 recursively.
1698
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001699- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001700 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1701 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1702 leaks.
1703
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001704- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1705
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001706- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1707 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1708 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1709 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1710 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1711 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1712 #705836.
1713
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001714- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001715 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1716
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001717- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1718 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1719 See SF bug #692416.
1720
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001721- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1722 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1723
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001724- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1725 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1726 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001727
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001728- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001729 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1730 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1731
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001732- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1733 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1734 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1735 timeouts to work properly.
1736
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001737Library
1738-------
1739
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001740- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1741 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1742 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1743 future release.
1744
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001745- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1746 for querying platform dependent features.
1747
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001748- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001749
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001750- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1751 pickle protocol versions.
1752
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001753- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1754 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1755 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1756
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001757- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1758
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001759- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1760 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1761 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1762 modules.
1763
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001764- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1765 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1766 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1767
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001768- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1769 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1770
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001771- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1772 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1773 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1774
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001775- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001776 MS Office extensions.
1777
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001778- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1779 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1780
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001781- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1782 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1783
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001784- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1785 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1786 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1787 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1788 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1789 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1790
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001791- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1792 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1793 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001794
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001795- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1796 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1797 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1798
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001799- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1800
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001801- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1802 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1803 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1804
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001805Tools/Demos
1806-----------
1807
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001808- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1809 See the module docstring for details.
1810
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001811Build
1812-----
1813
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001814- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1815 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001816
1817C API
1818-----
1819
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001820- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1821
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001822- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1823 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1824 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1825
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001826- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1827 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001828
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001829 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1830 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1831 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001832
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001833- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001834 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1835
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001836- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1837 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1838 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001839
1840New platforms
1841-------------
1842
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001843None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001844
1845Tests
1846-----
1847
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001848- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1849 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001850
1851Windows
1852-------
1853
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001854- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1855 function.
1856
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001857- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1858 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001859
1860Mac
1861---
1862
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001863- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1864 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001865
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001866- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1867 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001868
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001869- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1870 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1871 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001872
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001873- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001874 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1875 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001876
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001877- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1878 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001879
1880
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001881What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1882=================================
1883
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001884*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001885
1886Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001887-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001888
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001889- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1890 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1891 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1892
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001893- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1894 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1895 (SF patch #664376.)
1896
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001897- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1898 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1899 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1900 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1901 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1902 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001903 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001904
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001905- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1906 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1907 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1908 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001909 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001910
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001911- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1912 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1913 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1914 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1915 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1916 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1917 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1918 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1919 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1920 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1921 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1922
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001923- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1924 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1925 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1926 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1927 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1928 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1929
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001930- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1931 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1932
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001933- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1934 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1935 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1936 case.)
1937
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001938- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1939 passed as unicode strings.
1940
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001941- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1942 See SF bug #683467.
1943
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001944- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1945 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1946
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001947- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1948
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001949- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1950
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001951- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1952 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1953 arguments.
1954
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001955- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1956 See SF bug #667147.
1957
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001958- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001959 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001960 See SF bug #676155.
1961
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001962- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001963 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001964 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1965 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1966 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1967 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1968 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1969 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001970
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001971Extension modules
1972-----------------
1973
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001974- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1975 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1976 tp_as_number pointer.
1977
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001978- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1979 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1980 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1981 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1982 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1983
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001984- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1985
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001986- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1987
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001988- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001989 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001990 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1991 patch #678531.)
1992
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001993- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1994 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1995
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001996- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1997 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1998
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001999- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2000
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002001- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2002 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2003 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2004
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002005- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2006
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002007- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2008 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2009
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002010- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002011
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002012- datetime changes:
2013
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002014 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2015
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002016 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2017 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2018 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2019 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2020 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2021 now.
2022
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002023 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002024 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2025 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002026
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002027 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002028 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002029 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2030 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2031 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2032 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002033
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002034 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2035 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2036 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002037 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2038
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002039 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2040 by a later example coded by Guido.
2041
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002042 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002043 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2044 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2045 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002046 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2047 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2048
2049 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2050 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2051 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2052 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2053 tzinfo subclass instance.
2054
2055 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2056 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2057 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2058 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2059 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2060 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2061 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2062 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002063
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002064 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2065 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2066 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2067 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2068 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002069 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2070
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002071 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002072
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002073 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2074 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2075 as a naive datetime object.
2076
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002077 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2078 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2079 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2080
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002081 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2082 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2083 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2084 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2085 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2086 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2087 comparison.
2088
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002089 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2090 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2091 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2092 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002093 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002094
2095 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002096
2097 and ::
2098
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002099 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2100
2101 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2102 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2103 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2104 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2105
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002106 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2107 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2108 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2109 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2110 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2111
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002112 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2113 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002114 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2115 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002116
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002117Library
2118-------
2119
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002120- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2121 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2122
2123- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2124 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2125 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2126 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2127 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2128 See PEP 307 for details.
2129
2130- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2131 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2132
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002133- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2134 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002135 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002136 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2137 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002138 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002139
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002140- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2141 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2142
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002143- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2144 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2145 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2146
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002147- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2148
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002149- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2150 exception.
2151
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002152- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2153 class.
2154
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002155- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2156 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2157 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2158
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002159- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2160 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2161
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002162- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002163 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2164 See SF bug #659228.
2165
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002166- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2167 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2168 See SF patch #651082.
2169
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002170- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002171
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002172- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2173 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2174
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002175- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002176 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002177
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002178- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2179 DOS paths from other platforms.
2180
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002181Tools/Demos
2182-----------
2183
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002184- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2185 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2186 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2187 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2188 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2189 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2190 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2191 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2192 example:
2193
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002194 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2195 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002196
2197 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2198
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002199
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002200Build
2201-----
2202
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002203- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2204 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2205 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002206 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2207
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002208 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2209
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002210- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2211 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2212 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2213 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2214 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2215 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2216 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2217 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2218 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2219
2220- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2221 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2222 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2223 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2224
2225- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2226 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2227
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002228C API
2229-----
2230
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002231- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2232 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002233
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002234- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2235 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2236 tp_as_number pointer.
2237
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002238- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2239 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2240 (SF #681367)
2241
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002242- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2243 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2244 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2245 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002246
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002247Tests
2248-----
2249
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002250- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002251 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2252 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2253 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2254 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2255 pydoc.)
2256
2257- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2258
2259- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002260
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002261Windows
2262-------
2263
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002264- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2265 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2266 time).
2267
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002268- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2269 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2270
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002271- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2272 release without strong cryptography.
2273
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002274- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002275 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002276
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002277- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2278 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2279
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002280Mac
2281---
2282
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002283- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2284 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002285
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002286- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2287 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2288 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002289
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002290- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2291 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002292
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002293- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2294 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2295 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2296 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002297
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002298- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002299 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2300 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2301 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002302
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002303
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002304What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002305=================================
2306
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002307*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002308
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002309Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002310--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002311
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002312- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2313
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002314- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2315 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002316 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002317 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002318 a different meaning than before.
2319
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002320- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002321 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002322 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002323
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002324- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002325 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002326 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002327
2328- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2329 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2330 and deallocation.
2331
2332- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2333 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2334
2335- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2336 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2337 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2338 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2339 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2340
2341- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2342 now detected by the garbage collector.
2343
2344- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2345 [SF bug 519621]
2346
2347- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2348 identifier.
2349
2350- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2351 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2352 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2353 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2354 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2355 [SF bug 563060]
2356
2357- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2358 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2359 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2360 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2361 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2362
2363- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2364 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2365 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2366
2367- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2368
2369- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2370 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2371 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2372 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2373 state of the slots would be lost.)
2374
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002375Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002376-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002377
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002378- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002379 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2380 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2381 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2382 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002383 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2384 Jython 2.1.
2385
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002386- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002387 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002388 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2389 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2390 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2391 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2392 these, see PEP 302.
2393
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002394- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2395 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2396 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2397
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002398- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2399 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2400 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2401
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002402- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2403 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2404 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2405
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002406- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2407 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2408 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2409 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2410 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2411 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2412 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2413 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2414 releases or implementations.
2415
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002416- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002417 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2418 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002419
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002420- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2421 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2422
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002423- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2424 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2425 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2426
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002427- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2428 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2429
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002430- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2431 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002432 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2433 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002434
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002435- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2436 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2437 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2438 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2439 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2440
2441 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2442 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2443 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2444 pattern.
2445
2446 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2447 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2448 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2449 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2450
2451 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2452 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2453 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2454 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2455 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2456 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2457
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002458- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2459 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2460 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2461 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2462 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2463 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2464 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2465 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002466
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002467- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2468 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2469 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2470 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2471 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002472 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2473 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2474 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2475 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2476 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2477 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2478 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002479
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002480- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2481 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2482
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002483- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2484 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2485 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2486 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2487 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2488 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2489 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2490 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2491 to Zack Weinberg!
2492
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002493- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2494 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2495 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2496 type. This has been fixed now.
2497
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002498- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2499 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2500 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2501
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002502- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2503 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2504 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2505 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2506 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2507 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2508 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2509 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002510 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002511
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002512- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2513 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2514 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002515
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002516- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2517 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2518 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2519 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2520 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2521 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2522 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2523 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002524 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002525 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2526 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2527
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002528- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2529 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2530 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2531 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2532 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2533 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2534 this.)
2535
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002536- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2537 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002538 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002539 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002540 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2541 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002542 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2543 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002544
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002545- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2546 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2547 currently running.
2548
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002549- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2550 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2551 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2552 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2553
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002554- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2555 as directory names.
2556
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002557- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2558 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2559
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002560- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2561 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2562
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002563- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002564 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2565 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002566
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002567- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2568 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2569 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2570 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2571 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2572
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002573- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2574 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2575 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2576 removed.
2577
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002578- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2579 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2580 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2581
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002582- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2583 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2584 to __debug__.
2585
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002586- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2587 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2588 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2589
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002590- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2591 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2592 deprecated now.
2593
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002594- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2595 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2596 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002597
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002598- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2599 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2600 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2601 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2602 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002603
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002604- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2605 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2606
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002607- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2608 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2609 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002610 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002611 is backward compatible.
2612
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002613- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2614 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2615 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2616 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2617 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2618
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002619- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2620 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2621 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2622 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2623 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2624 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002625
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002626- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2627 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2628
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002629- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2630 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2631
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002632- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2633 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2634 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2635 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2636 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2637
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002638- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2639 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2640 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2641
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002642- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002643 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2644
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002645- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2646 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2647 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002648
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002649- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2650 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2651
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002652- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2653 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2654 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2655
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002656- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2657
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002658Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002659-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002660
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002661- Added three operators to the operator module:
2662 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2663 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2664 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2665
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002666- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2667
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002668- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2669 archives.
2670
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002671- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2672 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2673 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2674
2675 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2676
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002677- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2678 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2679 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002680 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002681
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002682- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2683 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2684 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2685 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002686 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2687 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2688 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2689 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002690
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002691- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2692 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002693
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002694- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2695
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002696- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2697 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2698
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002699- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2700 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2701 supported.
2702
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002703- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2704
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002705- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2706 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002707
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002708- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2709 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2710
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002711- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2712
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002713- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2714 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2715
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002716- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2717 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2718 functions but callable type objects.
2719
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002720- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002721 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002722 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002723
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002724- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2725 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002726
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002727- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2728 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002729
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002730- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2731 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2732 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2733 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2734
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002735- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2736 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002737
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002738- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2739 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2740 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2741 and __imul__.
2742
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002743- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002744 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2745 is called.
2746
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002747- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2748 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2749 interpreter was compiled.
2750
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002751- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2752 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2753 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002754 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002755 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2756 1, not 2.
2757
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002758- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2759 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2760 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2761 limit.
2762
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002763- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2764 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2765 bug #623464.
2766
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002767- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2768 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2769 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2770 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2771
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002772Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002773-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002774
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002775- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2776
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002777- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2778 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2779 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2780 with Python 2.3a2.
2781
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002782- os.path exposes getctime.
2783
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002784- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002785 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002786 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002787 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002788 unit tests of floating point results.
2789
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002790- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2791 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2792 has been increased.
2793
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002794- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2795 executed.
2796
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002797- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2798 postinstallation script.
2799
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002800- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2801 test the current module.
2802
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002803- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002804 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2805 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2806 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2807 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2808
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002809- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002810 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002811 Ward's Optik package.
2812
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002813- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2814 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2815 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2816 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2817
2818- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2819 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002820 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002821
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002822- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2823 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2824 shelf are binary pickles.
2825
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002826- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2827 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2828
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002829- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2830 modules are iterators now.
2831
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002832- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2833 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2834 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2835 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2836 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2837 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002838
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002839- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2840 with their entity value.
2841
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002842- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2843
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002844- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2845 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002846
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002847- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2848 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002849 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002850
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002851- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2852 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2853 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2854 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2855 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2856 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2857 main():
2858
2859 import locale
2860 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2861
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002862- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2863 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2864
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002865- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2866 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2867 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2868 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2869 to the new standard.
2870
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002871- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2872 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2873 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2874 an extension to the database.
2875
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002876- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2877 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2878 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2879 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002880 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002881
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002882- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002883 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002884
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002885- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2886 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2887 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2888 bounded integers.
2889
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002890- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2891 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2892 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2893 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2894 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2895 in existence.
2896
2897 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2898 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2899 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2900 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2901 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2902 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2903
2904 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2905 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2906 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2907 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2908
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002909- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2910 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2911 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2912
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002913- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2914
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002915- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2916 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2917 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2918 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2919
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002920- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2921 argument.
2922
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002923- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2924 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2925 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2926 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2927 [SF patch 560794].
2928
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002929- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2930 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2931 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002932 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2933 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2934 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002935
2936- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2937 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002938
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002939- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2940 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2941 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2942 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002943
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002944- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2945 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2946 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2947 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2948 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2949
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002950- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002951
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002952- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2953
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002954- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2955 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2956 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2957 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2958 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2959 identical to None.
2960
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002961- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2962 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2963 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2964 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2965 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2966 results now.
2967
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002968- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2969 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2970
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002971- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2972 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2973 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2974 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2975 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2976 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2977 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2978 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2979
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002980- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2981
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002982- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2983 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2984
2985- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2986 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2987 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2988 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2989 and other systems.
2990
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002991- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2992 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2993 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2994 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 +00002995 work well with these.
2996
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002997- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2998
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002999- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003000 connections.
3001
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003002- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3003 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3004 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3005
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003006- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3007 sets
3008
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003009- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3010 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3011 name.
3012
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003013- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3014 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3015 passed in.
3016
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003017- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003018 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003019 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3020 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003021
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003022- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3023
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003024- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3025
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003026- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3027 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3028 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3029
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003030- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3031 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3032 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3033 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003034 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003035
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003036- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003037 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003038 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003039
3040- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3041 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3042 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3043
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003044- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003045 the value of its expression argument.
3046
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003047- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3048 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3049 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3050
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003051- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3052 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3053 skipstone browser was included.
3054
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003055- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3056 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3057
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003058Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003059-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003060
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003061- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3062 names in addition to accepting file names.
3063
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003064- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3065 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3066 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3067 still used and useful.)
3068
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003069- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3070 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3071 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3072 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003073
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003074- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3075 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3076 the generated binary.
3077
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003078Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003079-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003080
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003081- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3082
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003083- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3084 except in the hands of experts.
3085
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003086- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003087 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3088 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3089 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003090
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003091- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3092 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3093 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3094 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3095 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3096 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3097 builds.
3098
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003099- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3100 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3101 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3102 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3103 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3104 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3105 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3106 new type.
3107
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003108- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003109
3110 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3111 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3112 positive infinities.
3113
3114 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3115 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3116 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3117 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3118 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3119 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3120 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3121
3122 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3123
3124 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3125
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003126- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3127 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3128 size of the executable.
3129
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003130- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3131 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3132 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3133 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003134
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003135- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3136
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003137- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3138 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3139 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003140
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003141- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3142 well as Unix.
3143
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003144- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3145 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3146 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3147 modules in the README file for details.
3148
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003149C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003150-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003151
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003152- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3153 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003154 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003155 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003156 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003157
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003158- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3159 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3160 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3161 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3162 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3163 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003164 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003165 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3166 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3167 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3168 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3169 aligned.)
3170
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003171- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3172 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3173 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3174
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003175- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3176 level.
3177
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003178- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3179 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3180 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3181 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3182 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3183
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003184- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3185 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3186 code.
3187
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003188- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3189 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3190 adjusting for negative indices.
3191
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003192- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3193 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3194 object.
3195
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003196- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3197 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3198 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3199
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003200- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3201 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003202
3203- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3204
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003205- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3206 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3207 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3208 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3209
3210- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3211
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003212- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003213
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003214- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003215 without going through the buffer API.
3216
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003217- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003218
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003219- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3220 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3221 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3222 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3223
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003224- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3225 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3226
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003227- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003228 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3229
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003230New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003231-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003232
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003233- OpenVMS is now supported.
3234
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003235- AtheOS is now supported.
3236
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003237- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3238
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003239- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3240
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003241Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003242-----
3243
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003244- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3245 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3246 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003247
3248Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003249-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003250
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003251- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3252 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3253 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3254 bugs.
3255 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003256 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003257 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3258 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003259 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003260
3261- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003262 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003263
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003264- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3265 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3266
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003267- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3268 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003269 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003270 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3271
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003272- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3273 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3274 use files" uninstall option).
3275
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003276- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3277
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003278- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3279 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3280
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003281- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3282 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3283 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3284
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003285- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3286 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3287 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3288 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3289 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003290 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3291 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3292 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003293
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003294- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003295 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003296 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3297 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3298 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3299 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3300 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3301 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3302 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3303 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3304 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3305 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3306 work around.
3307
3308- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3309 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3310 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3311 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3312 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3313 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3314 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3315 specified with O_CREAT too).
3316
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003317Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003318----
3319
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003320- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003321
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003322- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3323 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3324 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3325
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003326- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3327 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3328 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3329
3330- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3331 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3332 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3333 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3334 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3335 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3336 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3337 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003338
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003339- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3340 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3341 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003342
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003343- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3344 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3345 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3346 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3347 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003348
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003349- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3350 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3351 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003352
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003353- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3354 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003355
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003356- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3357 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3358 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3359 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3360 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003361
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003362- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3363 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3364 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3365
3366- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3367 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3368 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003369
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003370- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3371 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3372 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3373 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003374 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003375
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003376- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3377 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003378
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003379- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3380 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003381
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003382- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003383 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003384 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3385 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003386
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003387
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003388What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003389===============================
3390
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003391*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3392
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003393Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003394--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003395
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003396- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3397 with a custom metaclass.
3398
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003399Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003400-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003401
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003402- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3403 are proxies.
3404
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003405Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003406-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003407
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003408- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3409 very short strings.
3410
3411- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3412 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3413 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3414 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3415 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3416
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003417Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003418-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003419
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003420- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3421 close or delete time).
3422
3423- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3424 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3425
3426- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3427
3428- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003429 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003430
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003431Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003432-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003433
3434Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003435-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003436
3437C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003438-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003439
3440New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003441-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003442
3443Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003444-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003445
3446Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003447-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003448
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003449- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3450
3451- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3452 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3453
3454- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3455 deleted at process exit time.
3456
3457- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3458 in backslash.
3459
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003460Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003461----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003462
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003463- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3464 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3465 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3466
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003467
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003468What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003469===========================
3470
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003471*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3472
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003473Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003474--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003475
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003476- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3477 been extensively updated. See
3478
3479 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3480
3481 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3482
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003483- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3484 deleted!
3485
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003486- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3487 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3488 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3489 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3490 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3491
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003492- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3493
3494 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3495 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3496
3497 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3498 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3499 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3500 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3501 supported anyway.
3502
3503 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3504 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3505
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003506- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3507 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3508 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3509 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3510 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003511
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003512- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3513 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3514 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3515
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003516Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003517-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003518
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003519- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3520 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3521 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3522 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3523 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3524 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003525 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3526 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3527 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3528 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003529
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003530- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3531 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3532 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3533
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003534Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003535-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003536
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003537- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3538
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003539Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003540-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003541
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003542- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3543 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3544 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3545 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3546 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3547 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3548
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003549- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3550
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003551- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3552
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003553- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3554
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003555- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3556 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3557 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3558
3559- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3560
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003561Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003562-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003563
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003564- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3565 off a search on Google.
3566
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003567Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003568-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003569
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003570- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3571 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3572 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3573 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3574 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3575 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3576 other platforms should do likewise.
3577
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003578- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3579 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3580 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3581
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003582C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003583-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003584
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003585- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3586 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3587 producing key-value pairs.
3588
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003589- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003590 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003591 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3592 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3593 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3594 previously went unchallenged.
3595
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003596New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003597-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003598
3599Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003600-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003601
3602Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003603-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003604
3605Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003606----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003607
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003608- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3609 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003610
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003611- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3612 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3613 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3614 home.
3615
3616
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003617What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003618===========================
3619
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003620*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3621
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003622Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003623--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003624
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003625- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3626 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003627
3628 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003629 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003630
3631 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3632 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003633 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003634 This needs to be documented.
3635
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003636- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3637 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3638
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003639- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3640 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3641 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3642
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003643- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3644 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3645
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003646- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3647 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3648 class forbids it).
3649
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003650- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3651 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3652 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3653
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003654- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3655
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003656Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003657-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003658
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003659- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3660 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003661 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003662
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003663- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3664 (like 1 + '').
3665
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003666Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003667-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003668
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003669- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3670 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3671 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3672 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003673 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003674 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3675
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003676- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3677 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3678 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3679 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3680
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003681- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3682 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003683 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3684 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3685 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003686
3687- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3688 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003689
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003690- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3691 bytes on its input.
3692
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003693Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003694-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003695
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003696- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003697 convenience function.
3698
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003699- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3700 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3701 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003702 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3703 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3704 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3705 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3706 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3707 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003708
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003709- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3710 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3711 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3712 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3713
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003714- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3715 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3716 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3717
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003718- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3719 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3720 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3721 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3722
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003723- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3724 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003725 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003726 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3727 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3728 new -l and -e options.
3729
3730- statcache is now deprecated.
3731
3732- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3733 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003734 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003735 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3736 time properly taken into account.
3737
3738- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3739 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3740 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3741 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3742
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003743Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003744-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003745
3746Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003747-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003748
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003749- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3750 is built with libdb3 if available.
3751
3752- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3753
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003754C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003755-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003756
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003757- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3758 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3759 PySequence_Size().
3760
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003761- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3762
3763- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3764 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3765 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3766
3767- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3768 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3769
3770- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3771 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3772
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003773New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003774-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003775
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003776- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3777 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3778
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003779- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3780 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3781
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003782- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3783
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003784Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003785-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003786
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003787- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3788 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3789
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003790Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003791-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003792
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003793Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003794----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003795
3796- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3797 removed completely in the next release.
3798
3799- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3800 OSX.
3801
3802- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3803 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3804
3805- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3806
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003807
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003808What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003809===========================
3810
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003811*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3812
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003813Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003814--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003815
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003816- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003817 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003818 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003819 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3820 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003821 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3822 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003823 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3824 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003825
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003826- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3827 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3828
3829- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3830 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3831
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003832Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003833-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003834
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003835- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3836 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3837 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3838 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3839 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3840 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3841 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3842 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3843
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003844- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3845 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3846 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3847 example).
3848
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003849- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003850 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003851 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003852 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003853
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003854- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3855 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3856 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003857 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003858
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003859- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3860 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3861 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3862 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3863 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3864 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3865
3866 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3867
3868 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3869
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003870Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003871-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003872
3873- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3874
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003875- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3876
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003877- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3878 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003879
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003880- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3881 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3882 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3883 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3884 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3885 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003886 attributes.
3887
3888- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3889 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3890 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003891
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003892- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3893 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3894 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003895
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003896- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3897 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3898 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003899 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3900 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3901
3902- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3903 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003904
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003905Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003906-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003907
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003908- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3909 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3910
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003911- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3912 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3913 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3914 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3915
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003916- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3917 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3918 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3919 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3920
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003921 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3922 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3923 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3924 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3925 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3926 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3927 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3928 without losing information).
3929
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003930- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003931 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3932 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3933 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3934 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3935 module).
3936
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003937 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003938 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3939 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3940 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3941 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003942
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003943- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003944 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3945 encoding.
3946
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003947- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3948 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3949
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003950- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003951 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3952
3953- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3954 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3955 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3956 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3957
3958- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3959
3960- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3961 ON, and OFF.
3962
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003963- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3964 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3965
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003966Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003967-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003968
3969- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3970 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3971 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003972
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003973- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3974 been added: -X and -E.
3975
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003976Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003977-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003978
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003979- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3980 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3981
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003982C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003983-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003984
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003985- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3986 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3987 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3988 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3989 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3990
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003991- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3992 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3993 as long) arguments.
3994
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003995- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3996 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3997 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3998 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3999 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4000 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4001
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004002- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4003 input.
4004
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004005New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004006-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004007
4008Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004009-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004010
4011Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004012-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004013
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004014- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4015 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4016 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4017
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004018- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4019 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4020 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004021 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004022
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004023 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4024 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4025 import signal
4026 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004027
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004028 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004029 while 1:
4030 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004031 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004032 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4033 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4034 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4035 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004036
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004037
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004038What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4039===========================
4040
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004041*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4042
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004043Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004044--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004045
4046- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4047 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4048 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4049
4050- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4051 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4052 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4053 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4054 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4055 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4056 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004057
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004058- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004059 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004060 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4061 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4062 associate a docstring with a property.
4063
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004064- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4065 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4066 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4067 other built-in object types.
4068
4069- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4070 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4071 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4072 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4073 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4074
4075- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4076 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4077
4078- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4079 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004080 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004081 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4082 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4083 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4084 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4085 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4086
4087- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4088 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4089 class.
4090
4091- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4092 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4093 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4094 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4095
4096- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4097 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4098 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4099 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4100
4101- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4102 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4103
4104- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4105 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4106 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4107 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4108 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004109 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004110 with the same value as s.
4111
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004112- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4113
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004114Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004115----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004116
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004117- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4118
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004119- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4120 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4121 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4122 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4123 objects.
4124
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004125- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4126 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004127 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4128 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4129
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004130- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4131 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4132 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4133
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004134Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004135-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004136
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004137- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4138 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4139 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4140 by the instances.
4141
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004142- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4143 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4144 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4145
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004146- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4147 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4148 before the entire comparison is complete.
4149
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004150- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4151 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4152 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4153
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004154- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4155 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4156 getwriter().
4157
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004158- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4159 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4160
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004161- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004162 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4163 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4164
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004165- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4166 iterable object.
4167
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004168- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4169 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004170
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004171- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4172 authentication.
4173
4174- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4175 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004176
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004177- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004178 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4179 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4180 a sample driver.)
4181
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004182Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004183-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004184
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004185- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4186 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4187 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4188 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4189 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4190 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4191 kernel has large file support.
4192
4193- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4194 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4195 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4196 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4197 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4198
4199- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4200 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4201 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4202
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004203C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004204-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004205
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004206- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4207 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4208
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004209New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004210-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004211
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004212- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4213 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4214
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004215Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004216-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004217
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004218- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4219 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4220 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4221 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4222 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4223
4224- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4225 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4226 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4227 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4228
4229- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4230 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4231
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004232Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004233-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004234
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004235- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004236 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4237 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004238
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004239
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004240What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4241===========================
4242
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004243*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4244
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004245Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004246----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004247
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004248- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4249 big to represent as a C double.
4250
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004251- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4252 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4253 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4254 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4255 restriction).
4256
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004257- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4258 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4259 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4260 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4261 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4262
4263 >>> dir([])
4264 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4265 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4266 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4267 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4268 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4269 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4270 'reverse', 'sort']
4271
4272 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4273
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004274- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004275 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4276 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4277 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4278 OverflowError exception.
4279
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004280- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004281 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004282 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4283 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4284 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4285 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4286 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004287 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004288 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4289 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4290
4291 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4292 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4293 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4294 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004295
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004296- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004297 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4298 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4299 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4300 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4301 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4302 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4303 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4304 once it is created.
4305
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004306- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4307 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4308 (key, value) pairs.
4309
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004310- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004311 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4312 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4313
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004314- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4315 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4316 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4317 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4318 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004319
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004320- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004321 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4322 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4323
4324 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4325
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004326- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004327 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4328
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004329Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004330-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004331
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004332- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004333 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4334 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004335
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004336- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4337 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4338 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4339 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4340 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4341 in this area anymore).
4342
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004343- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4344 threading.Timer.
4345
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004346- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4347 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4348
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004349- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004350 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4351
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004352- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004353 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4354 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4355 converted to Python longs.
4356
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004357- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004358 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4359
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004360- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4361 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4362 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4363
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004364Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004365-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004366
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004367- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4368 division operators as per PEP 238.
4369
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004370Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004371-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004372
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004373- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4374 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4375 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4376 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4377
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004378C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004379-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004380
4381- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004382
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004383- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4384 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004385 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004386
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004387 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4388 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004389 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004390 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004391
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004392- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004393 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4394 module:
4395
4396 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004397
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004398 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4399 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004400
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004401 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4402 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004403
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004404 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4405
4406 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4407
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004408- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004409 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4410 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4411 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004412
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004413New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004414-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004415
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004416- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4417 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4418 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4419 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4420 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004421
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004422Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004423-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004424
4425Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004426-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004427
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004428- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4429 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4430 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4431 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004432 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4433 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4434 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4435 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4436 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004437
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004438- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004439 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4440
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004441
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004442What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4443===========================
4444
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004445*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4446
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004447Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004448-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004449
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004450- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4451 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4452
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004453- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4454 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4455 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004456
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004457- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4458 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4459 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4460 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004461
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004462- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4463
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004464- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004465
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004466Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004467-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004468
4469- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004470 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004471 the module docstring for details.
4472
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004473Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004474-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004475
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004476- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004477 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4478 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4479 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004480
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004481- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4482 Nick Mathewson.
4483
4484Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004485----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004486
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004487- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4488 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4489 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4490 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4491 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4492 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4493 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4494 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4495
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004496- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4497 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4498 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4499 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4500
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004501- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4502 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4503 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4504 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4505 come a long way).
4506
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004507- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4508 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4509 write filters for these warnings).
4510
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004511- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4512 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4513 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4514 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4515 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4516
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004517- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4518 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4519 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4520 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4521 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4522 older distribution.
4523
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004524Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004525-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004526
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004527- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4528 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004529 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004530
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004531- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4532 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4533 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4534
4535- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4536
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004537- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4538
4539- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4540
4541- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4542
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004543- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004544
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004545- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4546
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004547New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004548-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004549
4550C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004551-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004552
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004553- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4554 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4555 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4556 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4557 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4558 against buffer overruns.
4559
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004560- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004561 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4562 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004563 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4564 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4565 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4566
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004567- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4568 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4569 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4570 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4571 deprecated.
4572
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004573Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004574-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004575
4576- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4577 relevant is found.
4578
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004579
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004580What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004581===========================
4582
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004583*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4584
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004585Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004586----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004587
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004588- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4589 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4590 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4591 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4592 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4593 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4594 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4595 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004596 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004597 repaired.
4598
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004599- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004600 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004601 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4602 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4603 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4604 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4605 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4606 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4607 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4608 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4609
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004610- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4611 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4612 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4613 leading BMO character).
4614
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004615- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4616 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4617 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4618
4619 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4620 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4621 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004622
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004623 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4624 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4625 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4626 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4627 for various simple to use conversions.
4628
4629 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4630 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4631
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004632 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4633 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4634 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4635 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4636 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4637 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4638 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4639 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4640 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4641 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4642 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4643 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4644 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4645 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4646 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004647
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004648- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4649 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4650 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004651 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004652 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004653
4654 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004655 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4656 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4657 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4658 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4659 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004660 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4661 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004662
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004663 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4664 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4665 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004666 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004667
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004668- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4669 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4670 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4671 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4672 floating arithmetic,
4673
4674 x = 9007199254740992.0
4675 print long(x)
4676
4677 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4678 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4679 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4680 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4681 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4682 functions are of good quality).
4683
4684 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4685 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4686 algorithms to break.
4687
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004688- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4689 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4690 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4691 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4692 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4693 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4694 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4695 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4696 order.
4697
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004698- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4699 operation along the most common code paths.
4700
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004701- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4702 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4703
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004704- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4705 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4706 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4707 {}.update(UserDict())
4708
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004709- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4710 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4711 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4712 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4713 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4714 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4715 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4716 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4717
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004718- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004719 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004720
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004721 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004722 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4723 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004724 join() method of strings
4725 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004726 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4727 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004728 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004729 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004730
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004731- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4732 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4733
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004734- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4735 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4736
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004737- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4738 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4739 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4740 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4741
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004742- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4743 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004744 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004745 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4746 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004747
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004748- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4749
4750
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004751Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004752-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004753
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004754- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004755 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004756 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4757 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4758
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004759- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4760 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4761
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004762- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4763 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4764 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4765 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4766
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004767- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4768 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4769 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4770
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004771- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4772
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004773- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4774
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004775- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4776 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4777 that are still imported into string.py).
4778
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004779- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4780
4781- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4782 Now it does.
4783
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004784- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4785
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004786- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4787 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4788 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4789 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4790 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004791 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4792 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004793
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004794- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4795 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4796 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4797 'help(object)'.
4798
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004799Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004800-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004801
4802- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004803 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004804 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4805 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4806
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004807- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004808 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4809 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004810
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004811C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004812-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004813
4814- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4815 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004816
4817----
4818
4819**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**