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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
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +000015- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
16 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
17
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000018- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000019 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000020
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000021- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000022 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000023 which was missing for no apparent reason.
24
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000025- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000026 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
27 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
28
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000029- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
30 types that support garbage collection.
31
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +000032- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
33
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +000034- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
35 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
36 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
37 Jython.
38
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +000039- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
40
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000041Extension modules
42-----------------
43
44Library
45-------
46
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +000047- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
48 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
49 when dummy_threading is being used.
50
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +000051- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
52 from a tarfile.
53
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +000054- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +000055 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +000056
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +000057- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
58 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
59 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
60 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
61
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +000062- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
63 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
64
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +000065- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
66 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
67 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
68 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
69 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
70 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
71 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
72 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
73 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
74 by some other method in progress).
75
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000076- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
77 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
78 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +000079
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +000080- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
81
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +000082- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
83 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
84 AM Kuchling.
85
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +000086- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
87 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
88 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
89
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +000090- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
91 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
92 instead of unsigned.
93
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000094- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +000095 no longer part of the public API.
96
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +000097- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
98 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
99 string methods of the same name).
100
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +0000101- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
102 SF patch 982681.
103
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000104- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000105 SF patch 945642.
106
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000107- doctest unittest integration improvements:
108
109 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
110
111 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
112 DocTestSuites.
113
114- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
115 that provide thread-local data.
116
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000117- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
118 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
119
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000120- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
121
122- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
123 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
124 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
125
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000126
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000127Tools/Demos
128-----------
129
130Build
131-----
132
133C API
134-----
135
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000136- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
137 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
138
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000139Documentation
140-------------
141
142Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
143
144 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
145 assigning thier values
146
147 - correct my missconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
148
149 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
150
151
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000152New platforms
153-------------
154
155Tests
156-----
157
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000158- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000159 platforms that use the Makefile.
160
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000161- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
162 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
163 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
164
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000165Windows
166-------
167
168Mac
169---
170
171
172
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000173What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
174=================================
175
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000176*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000177
178Core and builtins
179-----------------
180
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000181- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
182 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
183 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
184 objects now (one object instead of three).
185
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000186- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
187 Windows DLLs.
188
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000189- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval() now accepts any mapping type.
190
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000191- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
192 a new .pyc magic.
193
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000194- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
195 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
196 be there.
197
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000198- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
199 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
200 the LC_NUMERIC category.
201
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000202- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
203 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
204 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
205
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000206- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
207
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000208- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
209 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
210 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000211
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000212- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
213 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
214
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000215- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
216
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000217- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000218 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000219
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000220- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
221
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000222- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
223
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000224- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
225 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
226
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000227- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
228 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
229 Fixes bug #858016 .
230
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000231- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
232 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
233 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
234
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000235- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
236 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
237 improves their performance (about 35%).
238
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000239- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
240 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
241 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
242
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000243- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
244 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
245 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
246 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
247
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000248- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
249 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
250 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
251 length is not known).
252
253- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
254 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000255 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
256 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000257 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
258
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000259- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
260 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
261
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000262- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
263 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
264 keyword arguments.
265
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000266- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
267 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
268 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
269
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000270- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
271 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
272 cases.
273
274- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
275 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
276 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
277 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
278 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
279 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
280 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
281 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
282 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
283 a release build.
284
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000285- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
286 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
287
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000288- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000289 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000290
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000291- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
292 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
293 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
294 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
295 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
296 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
297 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
298 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
299 destroyed.
300
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000301- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
302 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
303 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
304 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
305 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
306 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
307 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
308 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
309
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000310- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
311 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
312 character other than a space.
313
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000314- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
315 by the function object or by the method object, the function
316 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
317 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
318 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
319 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
320 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
321 attributes with the same name.
322
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000323- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
324 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
325 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
326 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
327 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
328 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
329 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
330 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
331 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
332 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
333 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
334 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
335 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
336 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000337
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000338- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
339 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
340 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
341 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
342 This has been repaired.
343
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000344- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
345
346- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
347
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000348- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
349 over a sequence.
350
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000351- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000352 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000353
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000354- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
355
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000356- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
357 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
358 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
359 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
360 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
361 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
362 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
363 records with equal keys is unchanged).
364
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000365- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
366 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
367 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
368
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000369- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
370 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
371 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
372 freelist.
373
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000374- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
375 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
376
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000377- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
378 number.
379
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000380- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
381 a TypeError exception.
382
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000383- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
384 820195.
385
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000386- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
387 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
388 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
389
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000390- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000391 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
392 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000393
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000394- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
395 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
396 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
397
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000398- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
399 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000400 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000401
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000402- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000403 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
404 the first call.
405
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000406
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000407Extension modules
408-----------------
409
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000410- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
411 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
412
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000413- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
414 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
415 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
416 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
417 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
418 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
419 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000420
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000421- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
422
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000423- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
424
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000425- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
426 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
427
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000428- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
429 fewer false positives.
430
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000431- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
432 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
433
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000434- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000435 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
436
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000437- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000438 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000439 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
440 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
441 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000442
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000443- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
444 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
445 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
446 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
447
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000448- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
449 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
450 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
451 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
452 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
453 #897625.
454
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000455- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
456 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
457
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000458- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
459 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
460 and pops on either side of the deque.
461
462- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
463 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
464
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000465- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
466 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
467 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
468 other functions that expect a function argument.
469
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000470- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
471
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000472- os.getsid was added.
473
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000474- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
475 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
476 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
477
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000478- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
479
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000480- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
481
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000482- readline.clear_history was added.
483
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000484- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
485
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000486- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
487
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000488- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
489
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000490- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
491
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000492- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
493
494- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
495
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000496- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
497
498- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
499
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000500- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
501 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
502 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
503
504- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
505 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
506 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
507 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
508 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
509 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
510 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
511
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000512- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
513 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
514 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
515 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000516
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000517- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000518 iterators from a single iterable.
519
520- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
521 of raising a TypeError exception.
522
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000523- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
524 as parameter.
525
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000526Library
527-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000528
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000529- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
530 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
531 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000532
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000533- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
534 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
535 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000536
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000537- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000538
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000539- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
540 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000541
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000542- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
543 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
544
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000545- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
546
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000547- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000548 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000549
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000550- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
551 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
552
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000553- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
554
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000555- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
556 on cygwin and mingw32.
557
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000558- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
559
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000560- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
561 module.
562
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000563- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
564 installation scheme for all platforms.
565
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000566- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000567 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000568
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000569- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
570 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
571 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
572
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000573- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
574 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
575 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
576
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000577- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
578
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000579- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
580
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000581- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
582 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
583
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000584- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
585 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
586 type pattern with the same value exists.
587
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000588- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
589 when run from the command prompt).
590
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000591- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
592 not taken into consideration when caching value.
593
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000594- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
595 default sort).
596
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000597- Added global runctx function to profile module
598
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000599- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
600
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000601- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
602
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000603- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
604
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000605- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000606 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
607 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
608 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
609 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
610 accordingly.
611
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000612- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
613 decoding standards.
614
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000615- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
616 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
617 called for all requests.
618
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000619- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
620 they are passed to the compiler.
621
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000622- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
623 indent, width and depth.
624
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000625- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
626 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
627
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000628- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
629 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
630
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000631- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
632
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000633- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
634
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000635- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
636
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000637- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
638 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
639
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000640- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000641 for better performance.
642
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000643- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000644
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000645- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
646 a string).
647
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000648- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
649
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000650- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
651
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000652- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
653
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000654- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
655
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000656- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
657 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
658 list of fieldnames.
659
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000660- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
661 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
662
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000663- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
664
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000665- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
666 empty lists.
667
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000668- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
669 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
670 and shelves.
671
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000672- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
673 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
674
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000675- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000676 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
677 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000678
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000679- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
680 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000681 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000682
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000683- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000684 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
685 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
686
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000687- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
688 and removed in Py2.4.
689
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000690- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
691
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000692- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
693
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000694Tools/Demos
695-----------
696
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000697- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
698 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
699
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000700- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
701
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000702- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
703 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
704 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
705 destination in situations where both files are given.
706
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000707- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
708 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
709 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
710 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
711
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000712- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
713
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000714- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
715 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
716 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
717 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
718 now.
719
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000720- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
721 in effect
722
723- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
724 C-c C-h
725
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000726- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
727 -d option was given.
728
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000729Build
730-----
731
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000732- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
733 build under OS X.
734
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000735- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
736 --enable-profiling.
737
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000738- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
739 is configured --with-tsc.
740
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000741- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
742 on AMD64.
743
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000744- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
745 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
746
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000747- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
748 removed.
749
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000750- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
751 supported (see PEP 11).
752
753- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
754
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000755- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
756
757- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
758 (see PEP 11).
759
760- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
761 sizeof(char) must be 1.
762
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000763C API
764-----
765
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000766- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
767 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
768 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
769
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000770- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
771 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
772 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
773 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
774
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000775- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
776 generator objects.
777
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000778- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
779 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000780 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
781 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000782
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000783- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
784 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
785
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000786- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
787 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
788 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
789 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
790 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
791
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000792- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
793 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
794 about 10% faster.
795
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000796- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
797 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
798
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000799- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
800 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
801 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
802 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
803
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000804Windows
805-------
806
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000807- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
808 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
809 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
810 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
811
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000812- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
813 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
814 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
815
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000816
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000817What's New in Python 2.3 final?
818===============================
819
820*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
821
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000822IDLE
823----
824
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000825- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
826 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
827 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
828 context-menu actions.
829
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000830- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
831 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
832 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
833 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
834 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
835 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
836 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
837 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
838 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
839
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000840
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000841What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
842=============================================
843
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000844*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000845
846Core and builtins
847-----------------
848
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000849- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000850 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000851 comment at the end are still unsupported.
852
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000853Extension modules
854-----------------
855
856- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
857 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
858 than once. This has been fixed.
859
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000860- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
861 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
862 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
863 call.
864
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000865- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
866
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000867Library
868-------
869
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000870- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
871 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
872
873- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
874 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
875 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
876 restored.
877
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000878IDLE
879----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000880
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000881- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000882
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000883Build
884-----
885
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000886- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
887 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
888
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000889C API
890-----
891
892Windows
893-------
894
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000895- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
896 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
897
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000898- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
899
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000900Mac
901---
902
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000903- Various fixes to pimp.
904
905- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
906
907- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
908 more problems than it solves.
909
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000910
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000911What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
912=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000913
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000914*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
915
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000916Core and builtins
917-----------------
918
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000919- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
920 by sys.setcheckinterval().
921
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000922- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
923 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000924 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000925
926- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
927 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
928 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000929 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000930
931- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
932 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000933
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000934- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
935 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
936 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
937
938- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000939 770247.
940
941- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000942
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000943Extension modules
944-----------------
945
946- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
947 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
948
949- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
950
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000951- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
952
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000953- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
954 contained within the _strptime module.
955
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000956- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
957 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
958
959- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000960 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
961
962- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
963 the find_class attribute, if present.
964
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000965- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000966
967 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
968 (SF bug 763298).
969
970 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000971 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
972 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
973 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000974
975 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
976
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000977Library
978-------
979
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000980- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
981
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000982- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
983 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
984 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
985 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
986 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
987 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
988 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
989 or Tester().
990
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000991- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
992 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
993 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
994 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
995 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
996 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
997 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
998 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
999 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001000
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001001 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001002
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001003- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1004 weren't before was an oversight.
1005
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001006- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1007 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1008
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001009- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1010 when there are no lines.
1011
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001012- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1013 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1014
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001015- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1016 to child processes.
1017
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001018- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1019
1020- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1021
1022- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1023 xmlrpclib.
1024
1025- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1026 responses.
1027
1028- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1029 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1030
1031- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1032 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1033 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1034
1035- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1036 used as patterns.
1037
1038- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1039 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1040 than Tk 8.3.
1041
1042- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1043
1044- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001045
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001046Tools/Demos
1047-----------
1048
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001049- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1050
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001051- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1052
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001053- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001054
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001055Build
1056-----
1057
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001058- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1059
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001060- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1061
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001062- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1063 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001064
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001065- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1066 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1067 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001068
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001069C API
1070-----
1071
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001072- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1073 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1074
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001075Windows
1076-------
1077
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001078- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1079 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1080 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1081 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1082 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1083 Python exception ::
1084
1085 thread.error: can't start new thread
1086
1087 is raised now.
1088
1089- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1090 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1091 instead of from DLL teardown.
1092
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001093Mac
1094---
1095
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001096- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001097 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001098 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1099 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1100 the executable in the bundle.
1101
1102- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001103
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001104- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1105
1106- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1107 on Panther.
1108
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001109What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1110================================
1111
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001112*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001113
1114Core and builtins
1115-----------------
1116
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001117- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1118 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1119 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1120 with the -i option.
1121
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001122- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1123 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1124
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001125- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1126 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1127
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001128- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1129 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1130 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1131 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1132 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1133 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1134 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1135 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1136 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1137 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1138 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1139 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1140 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001141
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001142- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1143 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1144 embedded in a lambda expression.
1145
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001146- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1147 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1148 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1149 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1150 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1151
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001152- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1153 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1154 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1155
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001156- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1157 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1158
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001159- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1160 It's writable again.
1161
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001162- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1163 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1164 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001165 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001166
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001167- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1168 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1169 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1170
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001171Extension modules
1172-----------------
1173
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001174- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1175 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1176
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001177- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1178 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1179 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1180 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1181
1182- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1183 collection.
1184
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001185- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1186 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1187 unique within a single program run.
1188
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001189- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1190 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1191
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001192- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1193 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1194
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001195- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1196 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001197
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001198- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1199
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001200- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1201 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1202
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001203- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1204 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1205 for many BSD-derived systems.
1206
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001207
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001208Library
1209-------
1210
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001211- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1212 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1213 primary ones:
1214
1215 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1216 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1217 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1218
1219 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1220 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1221 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1222 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1223 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1224 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1225
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001226- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1227 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1228 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1229 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1230 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1231 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1232 argument.
1233
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001234- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1235 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1236 in the archive.
1237
1238- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1239 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1240
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001241- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1242 569574).
1243
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001244- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1245 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1246 no more.
1247
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001248- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1249 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1250 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1251 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1252 code coverage.
1253
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001254- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1255 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1256 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001257 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1258 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001259
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001260- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1261 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1262 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001263 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001264
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001265- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1266
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001267- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1268 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1269 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1270 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1271
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001272- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1273 handling.
1274
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001275- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1276 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1277
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001278- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1279 in socket.py.
1280
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001281- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1282
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001283- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1284 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1285 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1286 opener with proxy support.
1287
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001288- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1289
1290- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1291
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001292Tools/Demos
1293-----------
1294
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001295- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1296
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001297- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1298
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001299- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1300 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001301
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001302- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1303 files.
1304
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001305Build
1306-----
1307
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001308- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001309 different root directory.
1310
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001311C API
1312-----
1313
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001314- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1315 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1316 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1317 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1318 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1319 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1320 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1321 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1322 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1323 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1324
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001325- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1326 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1327 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1328 from Python.
1329
1330
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001331New platforms
1332-------------
1333
1334None this time.
1335
1336Tests
1337-----
1338
1339- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1340 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1341
1342Windows
1343-------
1344
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001345- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1346
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001347- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1348 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1349 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1350 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1351 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1352 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1353 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1354 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1355 that's what it's for.
1356
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001357Mac
1358---
1359
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001360- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1361 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1362 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1363 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001364- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1365 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1366- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001367
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001368SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1369------------------------------------
1370
1371430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1372598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1373622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1374661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1375683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1376697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1377713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1378724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1379727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1380729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1381730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1382731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1383732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1384733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1385735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1386740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1387744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1388745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1389747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1390749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1391751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1392753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1393755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1394757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1395760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1396
1397
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001398What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1399================================
1400
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001401*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001402
1403Core and builtins
1404-----------------
1405
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001406- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1407 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1408
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001409- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1410 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1411 and cannot be strings).
1412
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001413- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1414 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1415 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1416 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1417
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001418- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1419 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1420 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1421 Python itself.
1422
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001423- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1424 the referenced object, if it has one.
1425
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001426- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1427 the thread started at
1428 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1429
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001430- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1431 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1432 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1433 placed on a list index.
1434
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001435- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1436 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1437 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1438 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1439
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001440- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1441 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1442 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1443 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1444 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1445 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1446 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1447
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001448- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1449 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1450 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1451 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1452 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1453
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001454- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1455 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001456
1457- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1458 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1459 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1460 #693195.)
1461
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001462- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1463 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001464
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001465- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001466 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001467 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1468 interpreter executions, would fail.
1469
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001470- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001471 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001472 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001473
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001474Extension modules
1475-----------------
1476
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001477- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1478 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1479 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1480 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1481
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001482- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1483 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1484
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001485- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1486 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1487 and Greg Chapman.)
1488
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001489- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1490 recursively.
1491
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001492- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001493 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1494 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1495 leaks.
1496
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001497- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1498
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001499- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1500 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1501 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1502 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1503 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1504 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1505 #705836.
1506
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001507- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001508 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1509
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001510- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1511 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1512 See SF bug #692416.
1513
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001514- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1515 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1516
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001517- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1518 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1519 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001520
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001521- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001522 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1523 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1524
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001525- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1526 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1527 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1528 timeouts to work properly.
1529
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001530Library
1531-------
1532
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001533- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1534 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1535 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1536 future release.
1537
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001538- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1539 for querying platform dependent features.
1540
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001541- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001542
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001543- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1544 pickle protocol versions.
1545
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001546- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1547 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1548 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1549
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001550- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1551
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001552- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1553 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1554 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1555 modules.
1556
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001557- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1558 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1559 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1560
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001561- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1562 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1563
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001564- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1565 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1566 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1567
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001568- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001569 MS Office extensions.
1570
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001571- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1572 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1573
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001574- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1575 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1576
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001577- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1578 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1579 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1580 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1581 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1582 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1583
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001584- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1585 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1586 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001587
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001588- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1589 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1590 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1591
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001592- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1593
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001594- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1595 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1596 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1597
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001598Tools/Demos
1599-----------
1600
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001601- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1602 See the module docstring for details.
1603
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001604Build
1605-----
1606
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001607- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1608 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001609
1610C API
1611-----
1612
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001613- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1614
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001615- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1616 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1617 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1618
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001619- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1620 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001621
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001622 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1623 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1624 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001625
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001626- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001627 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1628
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001629- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1630 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1631 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001632
1633New platforms
1634-------------
1635
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001636None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001637
1638Tests
1639-----
1640
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001641- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1642 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001643
1644Windows
1645-------
1646
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001647- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1648 function.
1649
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001650- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1651 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001652
1653Mac
1654---
1655
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001656- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1657 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001658
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001659- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1660 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001661
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001662- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1663 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1664 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001665
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001666- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001667 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1668 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001669
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001670- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1671 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001672
1673
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001674What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1675=================================
1676
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001677*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001678
1679Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001680-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001681
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001682- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1683 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1684 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1685
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001686- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1687 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1688 (SF patch #664376.)
1689
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001690- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1691 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1692 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1693 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1694 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1695 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001696 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001697
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001698- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1699 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1700 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1701 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001702 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001703
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001704- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1705 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1706 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1707 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1708 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1709 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1710 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1711 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1712 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1713 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1714 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1715
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001716- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1717 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1718 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1719 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1720 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1721 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1722
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001723- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1724 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1725
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001726- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1727 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1728 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1729 case.)
1730
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001731- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1732 passed as unicode strings.
1733
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001734- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1735 See SF bug #683467.
1736
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001737- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1738 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1739
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001740- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1741
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001742- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1743
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001744- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1745 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1746 arguments.
1747
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001748- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1749 See SF bug #667147.
1750
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001751- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001752 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001753 See SF bug #676155.
1754
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001755- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001756 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001757 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1758 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1759 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1760 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1761 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1762 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001763
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001764Extension modules
1765-----------------
1766
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001767- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1768 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1769 tp_as_number pointer.
1770
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001771- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1772 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1773 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1774 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1775 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1776
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001777- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1778
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001779- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1780
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001781- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001782 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001783 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1784 patch #678531.)
1785
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001786- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1787 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1788
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001789- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1790 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1791
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001792- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1793
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001794- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1795 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1796 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1797
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001798- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1799
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001800- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1801 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1802
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001803- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001804
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001805- datetime changes:
1806
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001807 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1808
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001809 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1810 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1811 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1812 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1813 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1814 now.
1815
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001816 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001817 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1818 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001819
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001820 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001821 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001822 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1823 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1824 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1825 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001826
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001827 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1828 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1829 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001830 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1831
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001832 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1833 by a later example coded by Guido.
1834
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001835 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001836 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1837 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1838 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001839 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1840 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1841
1842 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1843 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1844 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1845 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1846 tzinfo subclass instance.
1847
1848 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1849 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1850 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1851 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1852 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1853 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1854 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1855 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001856
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001857 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1858 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1859 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1860 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1861 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001862 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1863
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001864 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001865
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001866 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1867 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1868 as a naive datetime object.
1869
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001870 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1871 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1872 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1873
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001874 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1875 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1876 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1877 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1878 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1879 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1880 comparison.
1881
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001882 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1883 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1884 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1885 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001886 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001887
1888 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001889
1890 and ::
1891
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001892 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1893
1894 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1895 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1896 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1897 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1898
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001899 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1900 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1901 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1902 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1903 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1904
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001905 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1906 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001907 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1908 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001909
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001910Library
1911-------
1912
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001913- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1914 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1915
1916- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1917 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1918 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1919 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1920 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1921 See PEP 307 for details.
1922
1923- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1924 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1925
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001926- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1927 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001928 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001929 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1930 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001931 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001932
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001933- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1934 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1935
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001936- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1937 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1938 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1939
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001940- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1941
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001942- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1943 exception.
1944
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001945- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1946 class.
1947
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001948- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1949 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1950 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1951
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001952- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1953 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1954
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001955- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001956 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1957 See SF bug #659228.
1958
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001959- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1960 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1961 See SF patch #651082.
1962
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001963- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001964
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001965- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1966 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1967
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001968- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001969 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001970
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001971- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1972 DOS paths from other platforms.
1973
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001974Tools/Demos
1975-----------
1976
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001977- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1978 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1979 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1980 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1981 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1982 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1983 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1984 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1985 example:
1986
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001987 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1988 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001989
1990 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1991
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001992
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001993Build
1994-----
1995
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001996- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1997 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1998 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001999 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2000
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002001 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2002
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002003- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2004 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2005 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2006 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2007 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2008 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2009 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2010 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2011 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2012
2013- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2014 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2015 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2016 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2017
2018- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2019 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2020
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002021C API
2022-----
2023
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002024- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2025 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002026
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002027- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2028 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2029 tp_as_number pointer.
2030
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002031- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2032 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2033 (SF #681367)
2034
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002035- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2036 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2037 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2038 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002039
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002040Tests
2041-----
2042
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002043- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002044 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2045 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2046 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2047 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2048 pydoc.)
2049
2050- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2051
2052- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002053
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002054Windows
2055-------
2056
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002057- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2058 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2059 time).
2060
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002061- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2062 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2063
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002064- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2065 release without strong cryptography.
2066
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002067- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002068 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002069
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002070- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2071 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2072
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002073Mac
2074---
2075
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002076- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2077 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002078
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002079- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2080 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2081 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002082
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002083- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2084 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002085
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002086- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2087 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2088 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2089 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002090
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002091- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002092 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2093 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2094 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002095
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002096
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002097What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002098=================================
2099
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002100*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002101
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002102Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002103--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002104
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002105- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2106
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002107- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2108 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002109 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002110 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002111 a different meaning than before.
2112
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002113- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002114 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002115 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002116
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002117- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002118 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002119 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002120
2121- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2122 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2123 and deallocation.
2124
2125- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2126 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2127
2128- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2129 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2130 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2131 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2132 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2133
2134- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2135 now detected by the garbage collector.
2136
2137- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2138 [SF bug 519621]
2139
2140- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2141 identifier.
2142
2143- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2144 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2145 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2146 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2147 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2148 [SF bug 563060]
2149
2150- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2151 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2152 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2153 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2154 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2155
2156- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2157 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2158 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2159
2160- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2161
2162- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2163 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2164 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2165 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2166 state of the slots would be lost.)
2167
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002168Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002169-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002170
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002171- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002172 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2173 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2174 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2175 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002176 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2177 Jython 2.1.
2178
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002179- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002180 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002181 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2182 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2183 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2184 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2185 these, see PEP 302.
2186
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002187- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2188 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2189 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2190
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002191- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2192 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2193 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2194
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002195- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2196 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2197 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2198
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002199- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2200 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2201 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2202 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2203 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2204 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2205 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2206 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2207 releases or implementations.
2208
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002209- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002210 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2211 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002212
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002213- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2214 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2215
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002216- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2217 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2218 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2219
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002220- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2221 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2222
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002223- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2224 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002225 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2226 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002227
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002228- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2229 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2230 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2231 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2232 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2233
2234 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2235 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2236 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2237 pattern.
2238
2239 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2240 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2241 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2242 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2243
2244 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2245 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2246 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2247 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2248 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2249 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2250
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002251- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2252 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2253 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2254 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2255 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2256 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2257 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2258 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002259
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002260- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2261 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2262 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2263 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2264 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002265 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2266 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2267 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2268 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2269 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2270 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2271 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002272
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002273- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2274 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2275
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002276- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2277 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2278 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2279 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2280 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2281 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2282 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2283 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2284 to Zack Weinberg!
2285
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002286- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2287 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2288 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2289 type. This has been fixed now.
2290
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002291- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2292 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2293 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2294
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002295- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2296 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2297 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2298 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2299 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2300 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2301 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2302 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002303 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002304
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002305- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2306 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2307 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002308
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002309- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2310 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2311 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2312 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2313 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2314 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2315 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2316 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002317 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002318 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2319 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2320
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002321- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2322 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2323 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2324 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2325 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2326 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2327 this.)
2328
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002329- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2330 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002331 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002332 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002333 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2334 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002335 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2336 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002337
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002338- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2339 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2340 currently running.
2341
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002342- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2343 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2344 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2345 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2346
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002347- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2348 as directory names.
2349
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002350- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2351 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2352
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002353- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2354 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2355
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002356- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002357 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2358 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002359
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002360- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2361 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2362 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2363 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2364 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2365
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002366- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2367 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2368 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2369 removed.
2370
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002371- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2372 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2373 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2374
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002375- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2376 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2377 to __debug__.
2378
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002379- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2380 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2381 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2382
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002383- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2384 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2385 deprecated now.
2386
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002387- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2388 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2389 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002390
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002391- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2392 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2393 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2394 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2395 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002396
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002397- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2398 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2399
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002400- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2401 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2402 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002403 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002404 is backward compatible.
2405
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002406- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2407 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2408 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2409 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2410 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2411
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002412- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2413 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2414 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2415 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2416 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2417 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002418
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002419- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2420 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2421
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002422- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2423 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2424
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002425- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2426 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2427 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2428 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2429 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2430
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002431- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2432 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2433 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2434
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002435- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002436 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2437
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002438- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2439 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2440 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002441
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002442- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2443 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2444
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002445- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2446 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2447 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2448
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002449- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2450
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002451Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002452-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002453
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002454- Added three operators to the operator module:
2455 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2456 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2457 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2458
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002459- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2460
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002461- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2462 archives.
2463
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002464- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2465 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2466 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2467
2468 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2469
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002470- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2471 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2472 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002473 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002474
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002475- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2476 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2477 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2478 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002479 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2480 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2481 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2482 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002483
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002484- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2485 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002486
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002487- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2488
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002489- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2490 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2491
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002492- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2493 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2494 supported.
2495
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002496- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2497
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002498- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2499 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002500
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002501- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2502 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2503
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002504- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2505
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002506- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2507 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2508
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002509- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2510 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2511 functions but callable type objects.
2512
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002513- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002514 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002515 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002516
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002517- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2518 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002519
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002520- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2521 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002522
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002523- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2524 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2525 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2526 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2527
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002528- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2529 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002530
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002531- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2532 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2533 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2534 and __imul__.
2535
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002536- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002537 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2538 is called.
2539
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002540- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2541 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2542 interpreter was compiled.
2543
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002544- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2545 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2546 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002547 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002548 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2549 1, not 2.
2550
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002551- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2552 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2553 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2554 limit.
2555
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002556- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2557 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2558 bug #623464.
2559
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002560- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2561 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2562 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2563 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2564
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002565Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002566-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002567
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002568- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2569
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002570- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2571 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2572 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2573 with Python 2.3a2.
2574
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002575- os.path exposes getctime.
2576
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002577- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002578 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002579 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002580 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002581 unit tests of floating point results.
2582
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002583- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2584 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2585 has been increased.
2586
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002587- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2588 executed.
2589
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002590- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2591 postinstallation script.
2592
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002593- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2594 test the current module.
2595
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002596- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002597 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2598 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2599 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2600 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2601
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002602- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002603 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002604 Ward's Optik package.
2605
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002606- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2607 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2608 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2609 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2610
2611- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2612 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002613 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002614
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002615- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2616 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2617 shelf are binary pickles.
2618
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002619- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2620 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2621
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002622- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2623 modules are iterators now.
2624
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002625- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2626 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2627 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2628 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2629 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2630 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002631
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002632- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2633 with their entity value.
2634
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002635- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2636
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002637- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2638 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002639
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002640- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2641 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002642 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002643
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002644- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2645 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2646 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2647 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2648 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2649 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2650 main():
2651
2652 import locale
2653 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2654
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002655- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2656 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2657
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002658- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2659 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2660 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2661 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2662 to the new standard.
2663
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002664- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2665 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2666 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2667 an extension to the database.
2668
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002669- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2670 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2671 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2672 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002673 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002674
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002675- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002676 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002677
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002678- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2679 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2680 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2681 bounded integers.
2682
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002683- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2684 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2685 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2686 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2687 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2688 in existence.
2689
2690 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2691 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2692 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2693 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2694 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2695 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2696
2697 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2698 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2699 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2700 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2701
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002702- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2703 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2704 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2705
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002706- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2707
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002708- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2709 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2710 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2711 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2712
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002713- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2714 argument.
2715
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002716- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2717 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2718 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2719 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2720 [SF patch 560794].
2721
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002722- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2723 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2724 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002725 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2726 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2727 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002728
2729- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2730 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002731
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002732- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2733 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2734 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2735 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002736
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002737- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2738 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2739 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2740 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2741 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2742
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002743- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002744
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002745- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2746
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002747- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2748 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2749 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2750 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2751 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2752 identical to None.
2753
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002754- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2755 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2756 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2757 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2758 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2759 results now.
2760
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002761- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2762 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2763
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002764- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2765 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2766 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2767 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2768 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2769 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2770 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2771 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2772
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002773- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2774
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002775- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2776 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2777
2778- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2779 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2780 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2781 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2782 and other systems.
2783
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002784- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2785 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2786 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2787 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 +00002788 work well with these.
2789
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002790- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2791
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002792- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002793 connections.
2794
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002795- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2796 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2797 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2798
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002799- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2800 sets
2801
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002802- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2803 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2804 name.
2805
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002806- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2807 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2808 passed in.
2809
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002810- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002811 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002812 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2813 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002814
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002815- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2816
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002817- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2818
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002819- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2820 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2821 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2822
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002823- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2824 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2825 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2826 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002827 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002828
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002829- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002830 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002831 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002832
2833- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2834 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2835 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2836
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002837- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002838 the value of its expression argument.
2839
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002840- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2841 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2842 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2843
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002844- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2845 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2846 skipstone browser was included.
2847
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002848- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2849 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2850
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002851Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002852-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002853
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002854- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2855 names in addition to accepting file names.
2856
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002857- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2858 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2859 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2860 still used and useful.)
2861
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002862- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2863 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2864 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2865 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002866
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002867- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2868 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2869 the generated binary.
2870
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002871Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002872-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002873
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002874- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2875
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002876- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2877 except in the hands of experts.
2878
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002879- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002880 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2881 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2882 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002883
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002884- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2885 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2886 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2887 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2888 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2889 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2890 builds.
2891
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002892- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2893 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2894 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2895 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2896 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2897 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2898 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2899 new type.
2900
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002901- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002902
2903 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2904 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2905 positive infinities.
2906
2907 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2908 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2909 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2910 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2911 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2912 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2913 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2914
2915 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2916
2917 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2918
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002919- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2920 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2921 size of the executable.
2922
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002923- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2924 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2925 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2926 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002927
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002928- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2929
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002930- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2931 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2932 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002933
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002934- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2935 well as Unix.
2936
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002937- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2938 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2939 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2940 modules in the README file for details.
2941
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002942C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002943-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002944
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002945- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2946 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002947 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002948 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002949 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002950
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002951- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2952 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2953 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2954 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2955 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2956 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002957 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002958 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2959 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2960 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2961 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2962 aligned.)
2963
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002964- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2965 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2966 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2967
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002968- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2969 level.
2970
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002971- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2972 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2973 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2974 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2975 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2976
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002977- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2978 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2979 code.
2980
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002981- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2982 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2983 adjusting for negative indices.
2984
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002985- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2986 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2987 object.
2988
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002989- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2990 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2991 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2992
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002993- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2994 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002995
2996- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2997
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002998- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2999 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3000 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3001 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3002
3003- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3004
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003005- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003006
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003007- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003008 without going through the buffer API.
3009
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003010- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003011
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003012- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3013 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3014 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3015 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3016
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003017- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3018 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3019
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003020- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003021 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3022
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003023New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003024-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003025
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003026- OpenVMS is now supported.
3027
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003028- AtheOS is now supported.
3029
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003030- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3031
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003032- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3033
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003034Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003035-----
3036
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003037- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3038 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3039 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003040
3041Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003042-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003043
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003044- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3045 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3046 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3047 bugs.
3048 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003049 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003050 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3051 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003052 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003053
3054- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003055 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003056
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003057- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3058 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3059
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003060- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3061 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003062 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003063 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3064
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003065- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3066 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3067 use files" uninstall option).
3068
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003069- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3070
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003071- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3072 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3073
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003074- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3075 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3076 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3077
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003078- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3079 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3080 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3081 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3082 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003083 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3084 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3085 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003086
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003087- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003088 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003089 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3090 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3091 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3092 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3093 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3094 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3095 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3096 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3097 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3098 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3099 work around.
3100
3101- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3102 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3103 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3104 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3105 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3106 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3107 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3108 specified with O_CREAT too).
3109
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003110Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003111----
3112
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003113- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003114
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003115- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3116 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3117 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3118
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003119- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3120 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3121 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3122
3123- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3124 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3125 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3126 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3127 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3128 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3129 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3130 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003131
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003132- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3133 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3134 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003135
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003136- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3137 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3138 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3139 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3140 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003141
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003142- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3143 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3144 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003145
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003146- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3147 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003148
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003149- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3150 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3151 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3152 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3153 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003154
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003155- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3156 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3157 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3158
3159- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3160 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3161 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003162
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003163- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3164 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3165 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3166 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003167 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003168
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003169- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3170 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003171
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003172- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3173 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003174
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003175- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003176 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003177 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3178 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003179
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003180
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003181What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003182===============================
3183
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003184*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3185
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003186Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003187--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003188
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003189- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3190 with a custom metaclass.
3191
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003192Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003193-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003194
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003195- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3196 are proxies.
3197
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003198Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003199-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003200
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003201- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3202 very short strings.
3203
3204- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3205 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3206 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3207 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3208 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3209
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003210Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003211-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003212
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003213- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3214 close or delete time).
3215
3216- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3217 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3218
3219- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3220
3221- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003222 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003223
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003224Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003225-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003226
3227Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003228-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003229
3230C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003231-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003232
3233New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003234-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003235
3236Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003237-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003238
3239Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003240-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003241
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003242- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3243
3244- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3245 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3246
3247- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3248 deleted at process exit time.
3249
3250- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3251 in backslash.
3252
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003253Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003254----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003255
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003256- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3257 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3258 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3259
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003260
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003261What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003262===========================
3263
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003264*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3265
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003266Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003267--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003268
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003269- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3270 been extensively updated. See
3271
3272 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3273
3274 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3275
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003276- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3277 deleted!
3278
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003279- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3280 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3281 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3282 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3283 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3284
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003285- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3286
3287 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3288 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3289
3290 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3291 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3292 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3293 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3294 supported anyway.
3295
3296 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3297 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3298
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003299- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3300 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3301 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3302 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3303 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003304
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003305- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3306 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3307 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3308
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003309Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003310-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003311
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003312- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3313 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3314 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3315 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3316 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3317 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003318 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3319 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3320 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3321 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003322
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003323- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3324 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3325 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3326
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003327Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003328-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003329
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003330- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3331
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003332Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003333-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003334
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003335- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3336 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3337 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3338 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3339 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3340 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3341
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003342- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3343
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003344- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3345
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003346- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3347
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003348- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3349 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3350 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3351
3352- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3353
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003354Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003355-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003356
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003357- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3358 off a search on Google.
3359
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003360Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003361-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003362
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003363- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3364 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3365 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3366 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3367 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3368 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3369 other platforms should do likewise.
3370
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003371- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3372 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3373 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3374
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003375C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003376-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003377
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003378- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3379 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3380 producing key-value pairs.
3381
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003382- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003383 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003384 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3385 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3386 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3387 previously went unchallenged.
3388
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003389New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003390-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003391
3392Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003393-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003394
3395Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003396-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003397
3398Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003399----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003400
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003401- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3402 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003403
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003404- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3405 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3406 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3407 home.
3408
3409
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003410What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003411===========================
3412
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003413*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3414
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003415Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003416--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003417
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003418- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3419 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003420
3421 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003422 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003423
3424 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3425 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003426 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003427 This needs to be documented.
3428
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003429- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3430 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3431
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003432- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3433 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3434 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3435
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003436- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3437 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3438
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003439- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3440 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3441 class forbids it).
3442
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003443- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3444 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3445 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3446
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003447- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3448
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003449Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003450-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003451
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003452- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3453 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003454 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003455
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003456- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3457 (like 1 + '').
3458
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003459Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003460-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003461
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003462- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3463 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3464 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3465 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003466 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003467 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3468
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003469- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3470 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3471 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3472 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3473
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003474- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3475 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003476 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3477 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3478 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003479
3480- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3481 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003482
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003483- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3484 bytes on its input.
3485
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003486Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003487-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003488
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003489- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003490 convenience function.
3491
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003492- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3493 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3494 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003495 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3496 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3497 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3498 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3499 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3500 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003501
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003502- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3503 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3504 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3505 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3506
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003507- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3508 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3509 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3510
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003511- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3512 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3513 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3514 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3515
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003516- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3517 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003518 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003519 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3520 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3521 new -l and -e options.
3522
3523- statcache is now deprecated.
3524
3525- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3526 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003527 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003528 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3529 time properly taken into account.
3530
3531- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3532 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3533 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3534 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3535
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003536Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003537-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003538
3539Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003540-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003541
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003542- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3543 is built with libdb3 if available.
3544
3545- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3546
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003547C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003548-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003549
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003550- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3551 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3552 PySequence_Size().
3553
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003554- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3555
3556- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3557 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3558 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3559
3560- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3561 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3562
3563- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3564 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3565
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003566New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003567-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003568
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003569- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3570 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3571
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003572- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3573 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3574
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003575- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3576
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003577Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003578-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003579
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003580- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3581 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3582
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003583Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003584-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003585
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003586Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003587----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003588
3589- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3590 removed completely in the next release.
3591
3592- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3593 OSX.
3594
3595- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3596 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3597
3598- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3599
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003600
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003601What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003602===========================
3603
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003604*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3605
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003606Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003607--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003608
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003609- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003610 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003611 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003612 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3613 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003614 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3615 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003616 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3617 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003618
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003619- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3620 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3621
3622- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3623 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3624
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003625Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003626-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003627
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003628- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3629 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3630 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3631 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3632 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3633 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3634 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3635 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3636
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003637- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3638 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3639 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3640 example).
3641
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003642- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003643 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003644 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003645 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003646
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003647- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3648 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3649 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003650 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003651
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003652- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3653 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3654 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3655 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3656 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3657 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3658
3659 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3660
3661 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3662
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003663Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003664-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003665
3666- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3667
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003668- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3669
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003670- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3671 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003672
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003673- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3674 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3675 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3676 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3677 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3678 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003679 attributes.
3680
3681- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3682 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3683 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003684
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003685- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3686 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3687 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003688
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003689- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3690 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3691 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003692 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3693 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3694
3695- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3696 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003697
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003698Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003699-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003700
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003701- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3702 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3703
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003704- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3705 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3706 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3707 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3708
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003709- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3710 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3711 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3712 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3713
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003714 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3715 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3716 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3717 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3718 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3719 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3720 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3721 without losing information).
3722
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003723- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003724 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3725 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3726 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3727 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3728 module).
3729
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003730 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003731 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3732 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3733 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3734 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003735
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003736- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003737 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3738 encoding.
3739
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003740- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3741 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3742
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003743- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003744 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3745
3746- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3747 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3748 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3749 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3750
3751- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3752
3753- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3754 ON, and OFF.
3755
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003756- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3757 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3758
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003759Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003760-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003761
3762- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3763 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3764 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003765
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003766- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3767 been added: -X and -E.
3768
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003769Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003770-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003771
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003772- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3773 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3774
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003775C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003776-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003777
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003778- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3779 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3780 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3781 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3782 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3783
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003784- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3785 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3786 as long) arguments.
3787
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003788- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3789 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3790 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3791 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3792 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3793 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3794
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003795- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3796 input.
3797
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003798New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003799-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003800
3801Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003802-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003803
3804Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003805-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003806
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003807- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3808 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3809 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3810
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003811- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3812 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3813 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003814 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003815
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003816 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3817 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3818 import signal
3819 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003820
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003821 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003822 while 1:
3823 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003824 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003825 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3826 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3827 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3828 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003829
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003830
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003831What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3832===========================
3833
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003834*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3835
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003836Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003837--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003838
3839- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3840 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3841 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3842
3843- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3844 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3845 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3846 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3847 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3848 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3849 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003850
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003851- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003852 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003853 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3854 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3855 associate a docstring with a property.
3856
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003857- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3858 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3859 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3860 other built-in object types.
3861
3862- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3863 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3864 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3865 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3866 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3867
3868- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3869 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3870
3871- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3872 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003873 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003874 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3875 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3876 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3877 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3878 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3879
3880- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3881 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3882 class.
3883
3884- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3885 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3886 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3887 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3888
3889- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3890 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3891 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3892 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3893
3894- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3895 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3896
3897- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3898 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3899 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3900 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3901 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003902 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003903 with the same value as s.
3904
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003905- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3906
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003907Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003908----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003909
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003910- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3911
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003912- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3913 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3914 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3915 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3916 objects.
3917
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003918- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3919 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003920 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3921 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3922
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003923- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3924 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3925 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3926
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003927Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003928-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003929
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003930- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3931 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3932 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3933 by the instances.
3934
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003935- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3936 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3937 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3938
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003939- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3940 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3941 before the entire comparison is complete.
3942
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003943- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3944 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3945 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3946
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003947- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3948 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3949 getwriter().
3950
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003951- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3952 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3953
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003954- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003955 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3956 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3957
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003958- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3959 iterable object.
3960
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003961- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3962 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003963
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003964- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3965 authentication.
3966
3967- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3968 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003969
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003970- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003971 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3972 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3973 a sample driver.)
3974
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003975Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003976-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003977
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003978- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3979 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3980 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3981 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3982 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3983 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3984 kernel has large file support.
3985
3986- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3987 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3988 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3989 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3990 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3991
3992- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3993 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3994 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3995
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003996C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003997-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003998
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003999- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4000 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4001
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004002New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004003-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004004
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004005- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4006 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4007
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004008Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004009-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004010
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004011- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4012 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4013 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4014 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4015 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4016
4017- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4018 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4019 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4020 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4021
4022- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4023 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4024
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004025Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004026-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004027
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004028- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004029 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4030 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004031
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004032
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004033What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4034===========================
4035
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004036*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4037
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004038Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004039----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004040
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004041- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4042 big to represent as a C double.
4043
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004044- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4045 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4046 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4047 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4048 restriction).
4049
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004050- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4051 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4052 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4053 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4054 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4055
4056 >>> dir([])
4057 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4058 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4059 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4060 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4061 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4062 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4063 'reverse', 'sort']
4064
4065 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4066
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004067- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004068 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4069 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4070 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4071 OverflowError exception.
4072
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004073- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004074 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004075 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4076 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4077 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4078 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4079 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004080 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004081 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4082 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4083
4084 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4085 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4086 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4087 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004088
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004089- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004090 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4091 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4092 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4093 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4094 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4095 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4096 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4097 once it is created.
4098
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004099- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4100 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4101 (key, value) pairs.
4102
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004103- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004104 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4105 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4106
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004107- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4108 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4109 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4110 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4111 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004112
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004113- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004114 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4115 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4116
4117 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4118
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004119- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004120 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4121
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004122Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004123-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004124
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004125- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004126 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4127 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004128
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004129- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4130 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4131 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4132 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4133 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4134 in this area anymore).
4135
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004136- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4137 threading.Timer.
4138
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004139- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4140 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4141
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004142- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004143 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4144
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004145- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004146 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4147 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4148 converted to Python longs.
4149
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004150- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004151 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4152
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004153- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4154 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4155 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4156
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004157Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004158-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004159
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004160- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4161 division operators as per PEP 238.
4162
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004163Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004164-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004165
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004166- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4167 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4168 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4169 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4170
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004171C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004172-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004173
4174- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004175
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004176- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4177 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004178 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004179
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004180 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4181 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004182 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004183 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004184
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004185- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004186 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4187 module:
4188
4189 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004190
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004191 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4192 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004193
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004194 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4195 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004196
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004197 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4198
4199 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4200
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004201- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004202 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4203 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4204 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004205
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004206New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004207-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004208
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004209- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4210 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4211 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4212 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4213 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004214
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004215Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004216-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004217
4218Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004219-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004220
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004221- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4222 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4223 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4224 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004225 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4226 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4227 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4228 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4229 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004230
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004231- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004232 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4233
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004234
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004235What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4236===========================
4237
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004238*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4239
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004240Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004241-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004242
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004243- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4244 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4245
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004246- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4247 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4248 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004249
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004250- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4251 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4252 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4253 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004254
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004255- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4256
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004257- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004258
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004259Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004260-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004261
4262- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004263 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004264 the module docstring for details.
4265
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004266Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004267-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004268
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004269- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004270 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4271 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4272 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004273
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004274- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4275 Nick Mathewson.
4276
4277Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004278----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004279
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004280- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4281 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4282 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4283 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4284 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4285 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4286 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4287 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4288
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004289- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4290 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4291 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4292 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4293
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004294- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4295 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4296 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4297 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4298 come a long way).
4299
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004300- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4301 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4302 write filters for these warnings).
4303
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004304- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4305 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4306 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4307 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4308 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4309
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004310- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4311 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4312 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4313 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4314 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4315 older distribution.
4316
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004317Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004318-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004319
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004320- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4321 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004322 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004323
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004324- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4325 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4326 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4327
4328- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4329
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004330- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4331
4332- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4333
4334- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4335
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004336- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004337
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004338- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4339
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004340New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004341-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004342
4343C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004344-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004345
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004346- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4347 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4348 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4349 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4350 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4351 against buffer overruns.
4352
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004353- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004354 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4355 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004356 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4357 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4358 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4359
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004360- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4361 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4362 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4363 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4364 deprecated.
4365
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004366Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004367-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004368
4369- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4370 relevant is found.
4371
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004372
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004373What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004374===========================
4375
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004376*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4377
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004378Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004379----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004380
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004381- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4382 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4383 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4384 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4385 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4386 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4387 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4388 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004389 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004390 repaired.
4391
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004392- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004393 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004394 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4395 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4396 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4397 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4398 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4399 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4400 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4401 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4402
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004403- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4404 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4405 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4406 leading BMO character).
4407
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004408- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4409 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4410 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4411
4412 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4413 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4414 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004415
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004416 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4417 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4418 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4419 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4420 for various simple to use conversions.
4421
4422 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4423 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4424
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004425 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4426 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4427 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4428 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4429 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4430 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4431 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4432 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4433 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4434 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4435 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4436 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4437 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4438 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4439 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004440
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004441- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4442 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4443 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004444 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004445 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004446
4447 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004448 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4449 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4450 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4451 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4452 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004453 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4454 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004455
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004456 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4457 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4458 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004459 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004460
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004461- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4462 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4463 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4464 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4465 floating arithmetic,
4466
4467 x = 9007199254740992.0
4468 print long(x)
4469
4470 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4471 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4472 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4473 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4474 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4475 functions are of good quality).
4476
4477 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4478 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4479 algorithms to break.
4480
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004481- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4482 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4483 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4484 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4485 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4486 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4487 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4488 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4489 order.
4490
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004491- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4492 operation along the most common code paths.
4493
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004494- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4495 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4496
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004497- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4498 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4499 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4500 {}.update(UserDict())
4501
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004502- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4503 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4504 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4505 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4506 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4507 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4508 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4509 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4510
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004511- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004512 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004513
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004514 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004515 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4516 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004517 join() method of strings
4518 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004519 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4520 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004521 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004522 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004523
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004524- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4525 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4526
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004527- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4528 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4529
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004530- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4531 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4532 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4533 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4534
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004535- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4536 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004537 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004538 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4539 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004540
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004541- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4542
4543
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004544Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004545-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004546
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004547- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004548 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004549 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4550 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4551
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004552- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4553 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4554
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004555- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4556 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4557 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4558 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4559
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004560- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4561 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4562 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4563
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004564- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4565
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004566- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4567
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004568- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4569 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4570 that are still imported into string.py).
4571
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004572- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4573
4574- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4575 Now it does.
4576
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004577- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4578
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004579- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4580 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4581 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4582 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4583 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004584 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4585 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004586
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004587- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4588 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4589 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4590 'help(object)'.
4591
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004592Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004593-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004594
4595- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004596 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004597 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4598 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4599
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004600- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004601 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4602 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004603
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004604C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004605-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004606
4607- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4608 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004609
4610----
4611
4612**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**