blob: 21bcb4b6cc90aaae994047a2510ed8168b08c018 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000015- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
16 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
17
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000018- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
19 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
20
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000021- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
22
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000023- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
24 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error)
25
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000026- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
27
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000028- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
29 returning None.
30
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000031- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
32 ('\') with a specific error message.
33
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000034- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
35
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000036- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
37 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
38
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000039- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000040 an ferror() call.
41
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000042- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
43 list.sort().
44
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000045- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
46 (2+3) --> (5).
47
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000048- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
49
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000050- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
51 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000052
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000053- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
54 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
55 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
56
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000057Extension Modules
58-----------------
59
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000060- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
61 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
62
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +000063- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
64
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +000065- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
66 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
67 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
68
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +000069- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
70
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +000071- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
72 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
73
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +000074- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
75 file size.
76
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +000077- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
78
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +000079- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
80 {remove_history,replace_history}
81
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000082- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
83 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000084
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000085- stat_float_times is now True.
86
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000087- array.array objects are now picklable.
88
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000089- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
90 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
91
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000092- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
93 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
94 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
95
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000096- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
97 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000098
99Library
100-------
101
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000102- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
103 files to PyPI.
104
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000105- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
106 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
107 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
108 work as expected.
109
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000110- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
111 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
112
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000113- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
114 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
115
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000116- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
117
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000118- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
119 to build.
120
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000121- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
122 symbolic links on Windows.
123
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000124- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
125 profile.py if available.
126
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000127- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
128
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000129- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
130 in LWPCookieJar.
131
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000132- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
133
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000134- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
135
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000136- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
137
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000138- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
139
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000140- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
141
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000142- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
143
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000144- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
145
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000146- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
147
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000148- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
149 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
150 be exploited in various ways.
151
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000152- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
153
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000154- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
155
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000156- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
157
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000158- Enhancements to the csv module:
159
160 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
161 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
162 PEP 305.
163 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
164 reporting.
165 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
166 dictates.
167 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000168 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000169 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000170 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
171 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000172 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
173 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000174 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000175 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
176 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
177 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
178 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
179 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
180 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
181 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
182 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
183 without first creating a dialect class.
184 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
185 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
186 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000187 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000188 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
189 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000190 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
191 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
192 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
193 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000194 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
195 This has been fixed.
196
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000197- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
198 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
199 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
200 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
201
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000202- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
203
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000204- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
205 (Bug #951915).
206
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000207- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
208 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
209 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
210 encoding alias table
211
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000212- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
213
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000214- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
215 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
216
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000217- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
218
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000219- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
220
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000221- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
222
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000223- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
224
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000225- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
226
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000227- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
228 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
229 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
230
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000231- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000232 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000233
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000234- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
235 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
236 tokenizer with very long source lines.
237
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000238- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
239 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
240
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000241- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
242 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000243
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000244- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
245 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
246
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000247- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
248 correctly.
249
250
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000251Build
252-----
253
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000254- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
255 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
256 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
257
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000258- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
259
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000260- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
261 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
262
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000263- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
264 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
265 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
266 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
267 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
268 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
269 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
270 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
271
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000272- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
273 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
274 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
275 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
276
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000277
278C API
279-----
280
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000281- Removed PyRange_New().
282
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000283
284Tests
285-----
286
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000287- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000288
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000289
290Documentation
291-------------
292
293- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
294 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
295 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
296
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000297Mac
298---
299
300
301
302Tools/Demos
303-----------
304
305
306
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000307What's New in Python 2.4 final?
308===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000309
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000310*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000311
312Core and builtins
313-----------------
314
315- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
316 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
317 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
318
319
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000320What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
321==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000322
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000323*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000324
325Core and builtins
326-----------------
327
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000328- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
329 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
330 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
331
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000332
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000333Library
334-------
335
336- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
337 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
338 raised is re-raised.
339
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000340- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
341 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
342
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000343- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
344 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
345 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
346 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
347 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
348 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
349 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
350 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
351 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
352 by the slice are recomputed now.
353
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000354- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000355
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000356Build
357-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000358
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000359- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
360 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
361 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000362
363C API
364-----
365
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000366- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
367
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000368
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000369What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
370================================
371
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000372*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000373
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000374License
375-------
376
377The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
378is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
379changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
380Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
381intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
382durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
383the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
384License::
385
386 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
387
388says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
389to Python 2.1.1.
390
391The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
392License Version 2.
393
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000394Core and builtins
395-----------------
396
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000397- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
398 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
399 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
400 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
401 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
402 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
403 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
404 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
405 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
406 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
407
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000408- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000409
410Extension Modules
411-----------------
412
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000413- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
414 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
415 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
416 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000417
418Library
419-------
420
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000421- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
422 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
423 returned.
424
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000425- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
426
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000427- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
428 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
429
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000430- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
431
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000432- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
433 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000434
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000435- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
436
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000437- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
438
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000439- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000440 the source code is updated and reloaded.
441
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000442Build
443-----
444
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000445- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000446
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000447What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
448================================
449
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000450*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000451
452Core and builtins
453-----------------
454
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000455- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000456 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
457
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000458- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
459 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
460 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
461 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
462
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000463- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
464 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
465
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000466- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
467 constant.
468
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000469- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
470 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
471 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
472 large), and to anomalies such as
473 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
474 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
475 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
476 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000477
478Extension modules
479-----------------
480
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000481- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
482 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000483 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
484 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
485 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000486
487Library
488-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000489
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000490- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000491 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000492 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
493 --swig-cpp.
494
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000495- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
496 it is set.
497
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000498- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000499
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000500- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
501 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
502 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
503 Closes bug #1039270.
504
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000505- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000506
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000507 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000508 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
509 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
510 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
511 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
512 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
513 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
514 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
515 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
516 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
517 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
518 + Updates to documentation.
519
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000520- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
521 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
522 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
523 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
524
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000525- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000526
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000527- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
528 applications should use the getmember function.
529
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000530- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
531
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000532- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
533 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
534 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
535 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
536 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
537 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
538 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
539 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
540 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
541
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000542- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
543 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000544 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000545
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000546- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
547 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
548 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
549 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
550 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
551 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
552 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
553 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000554
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000555- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
556 the new public features (of which there are many).
557
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000558- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000559 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
560 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
561 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
562 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000563 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000564
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000565- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
566
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000567- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
568 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
569 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
570 options.
571
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000572- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
573 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
574 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
575 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
576 conditions under which non-string values work.
577
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000578Build
579-----
580
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000581- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
582 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
583 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
584
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000585- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
586 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
587 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
588 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
589 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000590
591C API
592-----
593
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000594- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
595 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
596
597- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
598
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000599- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
600 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
601 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
602 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
603 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
604 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
605 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
606 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
607 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
608
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000609- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
610
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000611- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
612 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
613 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000614
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000615Tests
616-----
617
618- test__locale ported to unittest
619
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000620Mac
621---
622
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000623- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
624 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
625 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000626
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000627Tools/Demos
628-----------
629
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000630- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
631 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
632 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
633 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
634 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000635
636
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000637What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
638=================================
639
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000640*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000641
642Core and builtins
643-----------------
644
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000645- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000646 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
647
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000648- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
649 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
650 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
651 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
652 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
653 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
654 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
655 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000656 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
657 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
658 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
659 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
660 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000661
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000662- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
663 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
664 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
665 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
666 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
667
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000668- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
669
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000670- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
671 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
672
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000673- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
674 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
675 modified the list.
676
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000677- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
678 functions is now writable.
679
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000680- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
681 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
682 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
683 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
684
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000685- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
686 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
687 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
688 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
689 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000690
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000691- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
692 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
693
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000694Extension modules
695-----------------
696
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000697- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
698
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000699- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
700 data.
701
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000702- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
703 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
704 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
705 supposed to have been truncated away.
706
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000707- Added socket.socketpair().
708
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000709- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
710 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
711
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000712- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000713 versions of Python, have now been removed.
714
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000715Library
716-------
717
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000718- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000719 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000720
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000721- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
722 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
723
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000724- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
725 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
726
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000727- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
728
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000729- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
730 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000731
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000732- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
733 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
734
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000735- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
736
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000737- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
738
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000739- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
740
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000741- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
742 Percivall.
743
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000744- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
745 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
746
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000747- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
748 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
749 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000750 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000751
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000752- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
753 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
754 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
755 and exponent.
756
757- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
758
759- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
760 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
761 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
762
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000763- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
764 to the readline module.
765
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000766- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000767 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
768 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000769
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000770- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
771 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
772 contains symlinks.
773
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000774- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
775 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
776
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000777- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
778 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
779 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
780
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000781- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
782 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
783 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
784 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
785 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
786 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
787 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
788 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
789 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
790 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
791 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
792 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
793 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
794
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000795- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
796
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000797Tools/Demos
798-----------
799
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000800- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
801 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
802
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000803- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
804
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000805Build
806-----
807
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000808- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
809 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
810 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
811 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
812 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
813 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
814 plans to do so.
815
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000816- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
817 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
818
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000819- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
820 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
821
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000822- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
823 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
824
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000825- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
826 GNU/k*BSD systems.
827
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000828- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
829 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
830
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000831C API
832-----
833
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000834..
835
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000836Documentation
837-------------
838
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000839- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
840 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
841
842- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
843 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
844 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000845
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000846New platforms
847-------------
848
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000849- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
850
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000851Tests
852-----
853
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000854..
855
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000856Windows
857-------
858
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000859- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
860 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
861 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
862 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
863 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
864 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
865 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
866 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
867 the problem.
868
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000869Mac
870---
871
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000872..
873
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000874
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000875What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
876=================================
877
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000878*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000879
880Core and builtins
881-----------------
882
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000883- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
884 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
885 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
886 sensitive code.
887
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000888- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000889 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000890
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000891 @staticmethod
892 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000893
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000894 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000895
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000896- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
897 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
898 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
899 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
900 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
901 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
902 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
903 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
904 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
905 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
906 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
907
908 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
909 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
910 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
911 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
912 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
913 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
914 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
915
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000916- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
917 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
918
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000919- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000920 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000921
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000922- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000923 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000924 which was missing for no apparent reason.
925
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000926- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000927 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
928 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
929
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000930- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
931 types that support garbage collection.
932
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000933- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
934
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000935- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
936 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
937 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
938 Jython.
939
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000940- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
941
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000942- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
943 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
944
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000945- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
946 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
947 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000948
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000949- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
950 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
951 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
952
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000953Extension modules
954-----------------
955
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000956- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
957
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000958Library
959-------
960
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000961- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
962 TIS-620
963
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000964- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
965 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
966 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
967 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
968 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
969 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
970 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
971 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
972 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
973 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
974
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000975- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
976
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000977- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
978 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
979 same as when the argument is omitted).
980 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
981
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000982- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
983
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000984- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
985 schemes are offered.
986
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000987- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
988
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000989- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
990 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
991 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
992
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000993- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
994
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000995- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
996 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
997
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000998- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
999 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1000 when dummy_threading is being used.
1001
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001002- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1003 from a tarfile.
1004
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001005- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001006 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001007
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001008- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1009 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1010 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1011 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1012
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001013- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1014 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1015
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001016- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1017 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1018 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1019 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1020 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1021 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1022 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1023 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1024 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1025 by some other method in progress).
1026
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001027- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1028 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1029 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001030
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001031- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1032
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001033- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1034 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1035 AM Kuchling.
1036
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001037- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1038 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1039 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1040
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001041- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1042 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1043 instead of unsigned.
1044
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001045- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001046 no longer part of the public API.
1047
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001048- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1049 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1050 string methods of the same name).
1051
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001052- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001053 SF patch 945642.
1054
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001055- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1056
1057 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1058
1059 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1060 DocTestSuites.
1061
1062- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1063 that provide thread-local data.
1064
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001065- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1066 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1067
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001068- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1069
1070- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1071 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1072 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1073
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001074- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1075
1076 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1077 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1078 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001079
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001080 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1081 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1082 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1083 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1084
1085 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1086 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1087
1088 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1089 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1090 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1091 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1092
1093 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1094 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1095 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1096 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1097 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1098
1099 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1100 wrapping help output.
1101
1102 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1103 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1104 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001105
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001106C API
1107-----
1108
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001109- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1110 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1111 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1112 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1113 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1114 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1115 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1116 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1117 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1118 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1119 its visible semantics have not changed.
1120
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001121- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1122 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1123
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001124Documentation
1125-------------
1126
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001127- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001128
1129 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001130 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001131
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001132 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001133
1134 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1135
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001136- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001137
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001138Tests
1139-----
1140
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001141- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001142 platforms that use the Makefile.
1143
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001144- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1145 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1146 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1147
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001148
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001149What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1150=================================
1151
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001152*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001153
1154Core and builtins
1155-----------------
1156
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001157- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1158 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1159 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1160 objects now (one object instead of three).
1161
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001162- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1163 Windows DLLs.
1164
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001165- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1166 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001167
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001168- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1169 a new .pyc magic.
1170
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001171- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1172 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1173 be there.
1174
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001175- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1176 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1177 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1178
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001179- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1180 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1181 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1182
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001183- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1184
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001185- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1186 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1187 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001188
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001189- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1190 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1191
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001192- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1193
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001194- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001195 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001196
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001197- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1198
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001199- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1200
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001201- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1202 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1203
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001204- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1205 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1206 Fixes bug #858016 .
1207
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001208- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1209 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1210 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1211
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001212- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1213 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1214 improves their performance (about 35%).
1215
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001216- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1217 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1218 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1219
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001220- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1221 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1222 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1223 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1224
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001225- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1226 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001227 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001228 length is not known).
1229
1230- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1231 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001232 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1233 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001234 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1235
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001236- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1237 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1238
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001239- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1240 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1241 keyword arguments.
1242
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001243- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1244 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1245 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1246
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001247- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1248 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1249 cases.
1250
1251- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1252 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1253 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1254 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1255 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1256 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1257 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1258 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1259 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1260 a release build.
1261
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001262- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1263 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1264
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001265- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001266 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001267
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001268- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1269 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1270 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1271 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1272 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1273 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1274 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1275 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1276 destroyed.
1277
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001278- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1279 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1280 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1281 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1282 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1283 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1284 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1285 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1286
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001287- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1288 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1289 character other than a space.
1290
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001291- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1292 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1293 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1294 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1295 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1296 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1297 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1298 attributes with the same name.
1299
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001300- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1301 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1302 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1303 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1304 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1305 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1306 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1307 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1308 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1309 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1310 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1311 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1312 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1313 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001314
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001315- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1316 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1317 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1318 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1319 This has been repaired.
1320
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001321- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1322
1323- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1324
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001325- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1326 over a sequence.
1327
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001328- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001329 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001330
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001331- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1332
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001333- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1334 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1335 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1336 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1337 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1338 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1339 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1340 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1341
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001342- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1343 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1344 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1345
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001346- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1347 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1348 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1349 freelist.
1350
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001351- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1352 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1353
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001354- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1355 number.
1356
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001357- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1358 a TypeError exception.
1359
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001360- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1361 820195.
1362
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001363- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1364 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1365 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1366
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001367- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001368 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1369 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001370
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001371- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1372 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1373 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1374
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001375- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1376 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001377 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001378
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001379- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001380 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1381 the first call.
1382
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001383
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001384Extension modules
1385-----------------
1386
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001387- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1388 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1389
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001390- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1391 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1392 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1393 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1394 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1395 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1396 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001397
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001398- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1399
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001400- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1401
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001402- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1403 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1404
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001405- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1406 fewer false positives.
1407
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001408- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1409 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1410
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001411- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001412 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1413
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001414- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001415 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001416 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001417 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1418 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001419
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001420- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1421 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1422 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1423 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1424
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001425- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1426 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1427 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1428 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1429 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1430 #897625.
1431
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001432- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1433 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1434
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001435- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1436 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1437 and pops on either side of the deque.
1438
1439- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1440 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1441
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001442- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1443 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1444 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1445 other functions that expect a function argument.
1446
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001447- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1448
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001449- os.getsid was added.
1450
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001451- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1452 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1453 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1454
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001455- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1456
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001457- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1458
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001459- readline.clear_history was added.
1460
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001461- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1462
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001463- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1464
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001465- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1466
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001467- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1468
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001469- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1470
1471- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1472
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001473- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1474
1475- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1476
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001477- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1478 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1479 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1480
1481- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1482 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1483 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1484 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1485 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1486 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1487 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1488
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001489- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1490 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1491 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1492 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001493
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001494- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001495 iterators from a single iterable.
1496
1497- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1498 of raising a TypeError exception.
1499
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001500- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1501 as parameter.
1502
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001503Library
1504-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001505
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001506- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1507 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1508 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001509
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001510- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1511 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1512 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001513
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001514- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001515
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001516- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1517 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001518
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001519- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1520 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1521
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001522- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1523
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001524- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001525 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001526
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001527- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001528 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001529
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001530- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1531
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001532- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1533 on cygwin and mingw32.
1534
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001535- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1536
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001537- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1538 module.
1539
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001540- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1541 installation scheme for all platforms.
1542
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001543- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001544 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001545
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001546- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1547 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1548 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1549
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001550- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1551 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1552 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1553
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001554- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1555
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001556- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1557
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001558- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1559 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1560
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001561- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1562 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1563 type pattern with the same value exists.
1564
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001565- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1566 when run from the command prompt).
1567
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001568- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1569 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1570
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001571- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1572 default sort).
1573
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001574- Added global runctx function to profile module
1575
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001576- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1577
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001578- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1579
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001580- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1581
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001582- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001583 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1584 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1585 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1586 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1587 accordingly.
1588
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001589- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1590 decoding standards.
1591
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001592- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1593 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1594 called for all requests.
1595
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001596- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1597 they are passed to the compiler.
1598
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001599- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1600 indent, width and depth.
1601
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001602- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1603 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1604
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001605- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1606 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1607
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001608- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1609
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001610- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1611
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001612- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1613
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001614- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1615 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1616
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001617- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001618 for better performance.
1619
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001620- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001621
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001622- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1623 a string).
1624
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001625- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1626
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001627- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1628
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001629- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1630
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001631- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1632
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001633- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1634 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1635 list of fieldnames.
1636
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001637- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1638 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1639
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001640- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1641
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001642- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1643 empty lists.
1644
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001645- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1646 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1647 and shelves.
1648
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001649- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1650 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1651
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001652- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001653 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1654 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001655
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001656- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1657 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001658 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001659
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001660- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001661 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1662 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1663
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001664- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1665 and removed in Py2.4.
1666
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001667- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1668
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001669- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1670
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001671Tools/Demos
1672-----------
1673
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001674- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1675 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1676
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001677- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1678
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001679- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1680 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1681 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1682 destination in situations where both files are given.
1683
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001684- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1685 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1686 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1687 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1688
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001689- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1690
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001691- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1692 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1693 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1694 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1695 now.
1696
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001697- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1698 in effect
1699
1700- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1701 C-c C-h
1702
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001703- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1704 -d option was given.
1705
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001706Build
1707-----
1708
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001709- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1710 build under OS X.
1711
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001712- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1713 --enable-profiling.
1714
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001715- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1716 is configured --with-tsc.
1717
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001718- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1719 on AMD64.
1720
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001721- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1722 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1723
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001724- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1725 removed.
1726
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001727- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1728 supported (see PEP 11).
1729
1730- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1731
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001732- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1733
1734- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1735 (see PEP 11).
1736
1737- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1738 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1739
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001740C API
1741-----
1742
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001743- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1744 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1745 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1746
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001747- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1748 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1749 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1750 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1751
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001752- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1753 generator objects.
1754
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001755- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1756 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001757 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1758 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001759
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001760- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1761 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1762
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001763- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1764 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1765 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1766 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1767 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1768
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001769- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1770 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1771 about 10% faster.
1772
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001773- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1774 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1775
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001776- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1777 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1778 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1779 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1780
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001781Windows
1782-------
1783
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001784- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1785 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1786 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1787 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1788
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001789- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1790 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1791 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1792
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001793
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001794What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1795===============================
1796
1797*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1798
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001799IDLE
1800----
1801
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001802- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1803 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1804 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1805 context-menu actions.
1806
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001807- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1808 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1809 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1810 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1811 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1812 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1813 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1814 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1815 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1816
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001817
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001818What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1819=============================================
1820
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001821*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001822
1823Core and builtins
1824-----------------
1825
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001826- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001827 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001828 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1829
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001830Extension modules
1831-----------------
1832
1833- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1834 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1835 than once. This has been fixed.
1836
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001837- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1838 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1839 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1840 call.
1841
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001842- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1843
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001844Library
1845-------
1846
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001847- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1848 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1849
1850- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1851 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1852 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1853 restored.
1854
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001855IDLE
1856----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001857
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001858- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001859
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001860Build
1861-----
1862
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001863- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1864 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1865
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001866C API
1867-----
1868
1869Windows
1870-------
1871
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001872- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1873 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1874
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001875- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1876
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001877Mac
1878---
1879
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001880- Various fixes to pimp.
1881
1882- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1883
1884- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1885 more problems than it solves.
1886
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001887
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001888What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1889=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001890
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001891*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1892
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001893Core and builtins
1894-----------------
1895
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001896- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1897 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1898
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001899- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1900 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001901 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001902
1903- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1904 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1905 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001906 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001907
1908- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1909 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001910
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001911- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1912 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1913 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1914
1915- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001916 770247.
1917
1918- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001919
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001920Extension modules
1921-----------------
1922
1923- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1924 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1925
1926- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1927
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001928- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1929
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001930- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1931 contained within the _strptime module.
1932
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001933- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1934 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1935
1936- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001937 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1938
1939- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1940 the find_class attribute, if present.
1941
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001942- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001943
1944 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1945 (SF bug 763298).
1946
1947 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001948 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1949 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1950 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001951
1952 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1953
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001954Library
1955-------
1956
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001957- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1958
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001959- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1960 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1961 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1962 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1963 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1964 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1965 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1966 or Tester().
1967
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001968- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1969 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1970 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1971 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1972 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1973 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1974 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1975 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1976 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001977
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001978 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001979
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001980- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1981 weren't before was an oversight.
1982
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001983- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1984 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1985
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001986- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1987 when there are no lines.
1988
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001989- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1990 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1991
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001992- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1993 to child processes.
1994
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001995- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1996
1997- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1998
1999- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2000 xmlrpclib.
2001
2002- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2003 responses.
2004
2005- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2006 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2007
2008- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2009 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2010 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2011
2012- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2013 used as patterns.
2014
2015- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2016 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2017 than Tk 8.3.
2018
2019- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2020
2021- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002022
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002023Tools/Demos
2024-----------
2025
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002026- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2027
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002028- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2029
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002030- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002031
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002032Build
2033-----
2034
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002035- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2036
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002037- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2038
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002039- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2040 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002041
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002042- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2043 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2044 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002045
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002046C API
2047-----
2048
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002049- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2050 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2051
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002052Windows
2053-------
2054
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002055- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2056 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2057 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2058 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2059 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2060 Python exception ::
2061
2062 thread.error: can't start new thread
2063
2064 is raised now.
2065
2066- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2067 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2068 instead of from DLL teardown.
2069
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002070Mac
2071---
2072
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002073- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002074 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002075 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2076 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2077 the executable in the bundle.
2078
2079- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002080
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002081- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2082
2083- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2084 on Panther.
2085
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002086What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2087================================
2088
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002089*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002090
2091Core and builtins
2092-----------------
2093
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002094- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2095 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2096 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2097 with the -i option.
2098
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002099- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2100 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2101
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002102- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2103 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2104
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002105- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2106 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2107 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2108 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2109 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2110 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2111 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2112 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2113 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2114 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2115 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2116 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2117 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002118
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002119- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2120 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2121 embedded in a lambda expression.
2122
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002123- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2124 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2125 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2126 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2127 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2128
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002129- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2130 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2131 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2132
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002133- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2134 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2135
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002136- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2137 It's writable again.
2138
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002139- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2140 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2141 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002142 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002143
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002144- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2145 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2146 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2147
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002148Extension modules
2149-----------------
2150
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002151- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2152 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2153
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002154- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2155 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2156 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2157 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2158
2159- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2160 collection.
2161
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002162- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2163 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2164 unique within a single program run.
2165
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002166- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2167 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2168
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002169- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2170 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2171
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002172- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2173 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002174
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002175- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2176
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002177- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2178 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2179
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002180- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2181 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2182 for many BSD-derived systems.
2183
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002184
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002185Library
2186-------
2187
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002188- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2189 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2190 primary ones:
2191
2192 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2193 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2194 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2195
2196 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2197 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2198 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2199 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2200 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2201 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2202
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002203- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2204 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2205 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2206 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2207 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2208 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2209 argument.
2210
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002211- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2212 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2213 in the archive.
2214
2215- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2216 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2217
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002218- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2219 569574).
2220
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002221- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2222 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2223 no more.
2224
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002225- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2226 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2227 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2228 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2229 code coverage.
2230
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002231- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2232 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2233 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002234 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2235 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002236
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002237- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2238 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2239 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002240 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002241
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002242- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2243
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002244- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2245 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2246 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2247 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2248
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002249- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2250 handling.
2251
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002252- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2253 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2254
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002255- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2256 in socket.py.
2257
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002258- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2259
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002260- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2261 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2262 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2263 opener with proxy support.
2264
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002265- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2266
2267- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2268
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002269Tools/Demos
2270-----------
2271
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002272- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2273
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002274- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2275
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002276- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2277 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002278
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002279- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2280 files.
2281
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002282Build
2283-----
2284
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002285- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002286 different root directory.
2287
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002288C API
2289-----
2290
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002291- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2292 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2293 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2294 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2295 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2296 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2297 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2298 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2299 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2300 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2301
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002302- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2303 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2304 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2305 from Python.
2306
2307
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002308New platforms
2309-------------
2310
2311None this time.
2312
2313Tests
2314-----
2315
2316- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2317 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2318
2319Windows
2320-------
2321
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002322- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2323
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002324- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2325 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2326 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2327 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2328 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2329 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2330 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2331 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2332 that's what it's for.
2333
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002334Mac
2335---
2336
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002337- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2338 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2339 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2340 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002341- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2342 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2343- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002344
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002345SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2346------------------------------------
2347
2348430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2349598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2350622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2351661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2352683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2353697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2354713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2355724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2356727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2357729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2358730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2359731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2360732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2361733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2362735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2363740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2364744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2365745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2366747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2367749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2368751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2369753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2370755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2371757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2372760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2373
2374
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002375What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2376================================
2377
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002378*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002379
2380Core and builtins
2381-----------------
2382
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002383- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2384 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2385
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002386- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2387 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2388 and cannot be strings).
2389
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002390- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2391 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2392 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2393 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2394
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002395- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2396 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2397 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2398 Python itself.
2399
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002400- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2401 the referenced object, if it has one.
2402
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002403- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2404 the thread started at
2405 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2406
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002407- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2408 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2409 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2410 placed on a list index.
2411
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002412- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2413 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2414 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2415 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2416
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002417- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2418 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2419 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2420 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2421 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2422 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2423 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2424
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002425- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2426 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2427 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2428 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2429 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2430
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002431- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2432 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002433
2434- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2435 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2436 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2437 #693195.)
2438
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002439- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2440 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002441
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002442- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002443 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002444 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2445 interpreter executions, would fail.
2446
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002447- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002448 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002449 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002450
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002451Extension modules
2452-----------------
2453
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002454- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2455 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2456 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2457 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2458
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002459- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2460 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2461
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002462- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2463 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2464 and Greg Chapman.)
2465
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002466- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2467 recursively.
2468
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002469- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002470 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2471 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2472 leaks.
2473
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002474- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2475
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002476- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2477 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2478 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2479 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2480 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2481 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2482 #705836.
2483
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002484- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002485 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2486
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002487- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2488 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2489 See SF bug #692416.
2490
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002491- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2492 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2493
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002494- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2495 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2496 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002497
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002498- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002499 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2500 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2501
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002502- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2503 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2504 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2505 timeouts to work properly.
2506
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002507Library
2508-------
2509
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002510- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2511 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2512 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2513 future release.
2514
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002515- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2516 for querying platform dependent features.
2517
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002518- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002519
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002520- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2521 pickle protocol versions.
2522
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002523- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2524 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2525 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2526
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002527- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2528
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002529- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2530 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2531 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2532 modules.
2533
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002534- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2535 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2536 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2537
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002538- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2539 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2540
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002541- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2542 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2543 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2544
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002545- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002546 MS Office extensions.
2547
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002548- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2549 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2550
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002551- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2552 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2553
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002554- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2555 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2556 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2557 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2558 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2559 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2560
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002561- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2562 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2563 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002564
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002565- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2566 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2567 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2568
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002569- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2570
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002571- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2572 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2573 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2574
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002575Tools/Demos
2576-----------
2577
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002578- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2579 See the module docstring for details.
2580
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002581Build
2582-----
2583
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002584- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2585 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002586
2587C API
2588-----
2589
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002590- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2591
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002592- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2593 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2594 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2595
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002596- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2597 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002598
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002599 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2600 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2601 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002602
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002603- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002604 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2605
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002606- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2607 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2608 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002609
2610New platforms
2611-------------
2612
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002613None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002614
2615Tests
2616-----
2617
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002618- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2619 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002620
2621Windows
2622-------
2623
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002624- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2625 function.
2626
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002627- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2628 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002629
2630Mac
2631---
2632
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002633- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2634 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002635
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002636- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2637 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002638
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002639- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2640 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2641 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002642
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002643- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002644 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2645 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002646
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002647- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2648 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002649
2650
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002651What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2652=================================
2653
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002654*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002655
2656Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002657-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002658
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002659- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2660 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2661 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2662
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002663- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2664 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2665 (SF patch #664376.)
2666
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002667- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2668 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2669 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2670 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2671 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2672 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002673 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002674
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002675- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2676 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2677 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2678 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002679 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002680
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002681- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2682 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2683 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2684 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2685 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2686 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2687 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2688 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2689 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2690 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2691 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2692
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002693- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2694 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2695 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2696 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2697 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2698 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2699
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002700- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2701 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2702
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002703- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2704 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2705 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2706 case.)
2707
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002708- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2709 passed as unicode strings.
2710
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002711- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2712 See SF bug #683467.
2713
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002714- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2715 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2716
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002717- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2718
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002719- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2720
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002721- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2722 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2723 arguments.
2724
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002725- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2726 See SF bug #667147.
2727
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002728- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002729 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002730 See SF bug #676155.
2731
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002732- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002733 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002734 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2735 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2736 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2737 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2738 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2739 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002740
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002741Extension modules
2742-----------------
2743
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002744- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2745 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2746 tp_as_number pointer.
2747
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002748- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2749 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2750 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2751 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2752 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2753
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002754- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2755
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002756- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2757
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002758- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002759 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002760 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2761 patch #678531.)
2762
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002763- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2764 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2765
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002766- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2767 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2768
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002769- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2770
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002771- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2772 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2773 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2774
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002775- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2776
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002777- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2778 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2779
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002780- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002781
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002782- datetime changes:
2783
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002784 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2785
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002786 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2787 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2788 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2789 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2790 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2791 now.
2792
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002793 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002794 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2795 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002796
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002797 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002798 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002799 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2800 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2801 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2802 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002803
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002804 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2805 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2806 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002807 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2808
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002809 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2810 by a later example coded by Guido.
2811
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002812 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002813 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2814 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2815 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002816 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2817 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2818
2819 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2820 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2821 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2822 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2823 tzinfo subclass instance.
2824
2825 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2826 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2827 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2828 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2829 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2830 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2831 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2832 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002833
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002834 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2835 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2836 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2837 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2838 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002839 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2840
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002841 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002842
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002843 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2844 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2845 as a naive datetime object.
2846
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002847 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2848 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2849 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2850
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002851 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2852 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2853 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2854 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2855 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2856 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2857 comparison.
2858
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002859 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2860 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2861 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2862 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002863 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002864
2865 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002866
2867 and ::
2868
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002869 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2870
2871 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2872 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2873 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2874 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2875
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002876 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2877 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2878 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2879 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2880 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2881
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002882 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2883 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002884 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2885 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002886
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002887Library
2888-------
2889
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002890- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2891 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2892
2893- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2894 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2895 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2896 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2897 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2898 See PEP 307 for details.
2899
2900- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2901 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2902
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002903- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2904 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002905 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002906 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2907 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002908 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002909
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002910- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2911 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2912
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002913- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2914 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2915 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2916
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002917- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2918
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002919- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2920 exception.
2921
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002922- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2923 class.
2924
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002925- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2926 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2927 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2928
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002929- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2930 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2931
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002932- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002933 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2934 See SF bug #659228.
2935
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002936- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2937 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2938 See SF patch #651082.
2939
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002940- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002941
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002942- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2943 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2944
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002945- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002946 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002947
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002948- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2949 DOS paths from other platforms.
2950
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002951Tools/Demos
2952-----------
2953
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002954- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2955 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2956 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2957 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2958 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2959 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2960 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2961 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2962 example:
2963
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002964 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2965 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002966
2967 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2968
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002969
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002970Build
2971-----
2972
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002973- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2974 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2975 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002976 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2977
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002978 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2979
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002980- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2981 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2982 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2983 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2984 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2985 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2986 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2987 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2988 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2989
2990- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2991 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2992 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2993 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2994
2995- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2996 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2997
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002998C API
2999-----
3000
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003001- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3002 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003003
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003004- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3005 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3006 tp_as_number pointer.
3007
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003008- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3009 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3010 (SF #681367)
3011
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003012- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3013 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3014 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3015 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003016
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003017Tests
3018-----
3019
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003020- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003021 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3022 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3023 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3024 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3025 pydoc.)
3026
3027- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3028
3029- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003030
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003031Windows
3032-------
3033
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003034- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3035 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3036 time).
3037
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003038- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3039 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3040
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003041- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3042 release without strong cryptography.
3043
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003044- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003045 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003046
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003047- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3048 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3049
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003050Mac
3051---
3052
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003053- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3054 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003055
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003056- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3057 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3058 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003059
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003060- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3061 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003062
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003063- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3064 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3065 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3066 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003067
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003068- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003069 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3070 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3071 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003072
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003073
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003074What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003075=================================
3076
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003077*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003078
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003079Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003080--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003081
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003082- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3083
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003084- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3085 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003086 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003087 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003088 a different meaning than before.
3089
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003090- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003091 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003092 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003093
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003094- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003095 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003096 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003097
3098- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3099 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3100 and deallocation.
3101
3102- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3103 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3104
3105- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3106 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3107 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3108 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3109 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3110
3111- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3112 now detected by the garbage collector.
3113
3114- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3115 [SF bug 519621]
3116
3117- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3118 identifier.
3119
3120- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3121 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3122 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3123 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3124 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3125 [SF bug 563060]
3126
3127- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3128 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3129 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3130 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3131 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3132
3133- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3134 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3135 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3136
3137- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3138
3139- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3140 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3141 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3142 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3143 state of the slots would be lost.)
3144
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003145Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003146-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003147
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003148- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003149 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3150 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3151 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3152 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003153 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3154 Jython 2.1.
3155
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003156- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003157 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003158 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3159 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3160 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3161 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3162 these, see PEP 302.
3163
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003164- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3165 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3166 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3167
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003168- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3169 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3170 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3171
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003172- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3173 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3174 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3175
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003176- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3177 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3178 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3179 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3180 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3181 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3182 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3183 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3184 releases or implementations.
3185
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003186- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003187 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3188 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003189
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003190- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3191 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3192
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003193- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3194 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3195 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3196
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003197- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3198 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3199
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003200- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3201 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003202 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3203 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003204
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003205- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3206 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3207 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3208 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3209 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3210
3211 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3212 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3213 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3214 pattern.
3215
3216 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3217 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3218 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3219 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3220
3221 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3222 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3223 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3224 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3225 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3226 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3227
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003228- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3229 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3230 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3231 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3232 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3233 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3234 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3235 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003236
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003237- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3238 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3239 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3240 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3241 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003242 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3243 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3244 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3245 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3246 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3247 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3248 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003249
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003250- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3251 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3252
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003253- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3254 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3255 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3256 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3257 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3258 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3259 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3260 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3261 to Zack Weinberg!
3262
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003263- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3264 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3265 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3266 type. This has been fixed now.
3267
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003268- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3269 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3270 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3271
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003272- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3273 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3274 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3275 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3276 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3277 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3278 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3279 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003280 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003281
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003282- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3283 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3284 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003285
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003286- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3287 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3288 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3289 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3290 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3291 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3292 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3293 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003294 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003295 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3296 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3297
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003298- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3299 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3300 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3301 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3302 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3303 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3304 this.)
3305
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003306- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3307 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003308 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003309 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003310 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3311 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003312 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3313 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003314
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003315- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3316 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3317 currently running.
3318
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003319- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3320 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3321 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3322 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3323
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003324- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3325 as directory names.
3326
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003327- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3328 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3329
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003330- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3331 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3332
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003333- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003334 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3335 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003336
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003337- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3338 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3339 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3340 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3341 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3342
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003343- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3344 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3345 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3346 removed.
3347
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003348- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3349 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3350 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3351
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003352- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3353 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3354 to __debug__.
3355
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003356- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3357 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3358 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3359
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003360- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3361 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3362 deprecated now.
3363
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003364- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3365 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3366 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003367
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003368- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3369 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3370 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3371 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3372 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003373
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003374- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3375 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3376
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003377- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3378 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3379 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003380 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003381 is backward compatible.
3382
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003383- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3384 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3385 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3386 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3387 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3388
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003389- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3390 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3391 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3392 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3393 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3394 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003395
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003396- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3397 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3398
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003399- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3400 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3401
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003402- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3403 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3404 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3405 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3406 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3407
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003408- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3409 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3410 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3411
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003412- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003413 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3414
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003415- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3416 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3417 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003418
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003419- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3420 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3421
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003422- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3423 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3424 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3425
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003426- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3427
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003428Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003429-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003430
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003431- Added three operators to the operator module:
3432 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3433 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3434 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3435
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003436- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3437
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003438- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3439 archives.
3440
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003441- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3442 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3443 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3444
3445 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3446
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003447- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3448 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3449 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003450 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003451
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003452- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3453 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3454 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3455 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003456 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3457 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3458 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3459 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003460
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003461- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3462 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003463
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003464- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3465
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003466- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3467 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3468
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003469- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3470 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3471 supported.
3472
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003473- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3474
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003475- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3476 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003477
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003478- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3479 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3480
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003481- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3482
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003483- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3484 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3485
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003486- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3487 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3488 functions but callable type objects.
3489
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003490- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003491 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003492 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003493
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003494- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3495 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003496
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003497- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3498 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003499
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003500- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3501 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3502 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3503 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3504
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003505- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3506 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003507
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003508- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3509 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3510 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3511 and __imul__.
3512
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003513- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003514 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3515 is called.
3516
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003517- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3518 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3519 interpreter was compiled.
3520
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003521- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3522 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3523 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003524 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003525 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3526 1, not 2.
3527
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003528- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3529 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3530 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3531 limit.
3532
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003533- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3534 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3535 bug #623464.
3536
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003537- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3538 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3539 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3540 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3541
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003542Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003543-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003544
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003545- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3546
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003547- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3548 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3549 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3550 with Python 2.3a2.
3551
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003552- os.path exposes getctime.
3553
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003554- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003555 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003556 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003557 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003558 unit tests of floating point results.
3559
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003560- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3561 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3562 has been increased.
3563
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003564- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3565 executed.
3566
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003567- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3568 postinstallation script.
3569
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003570- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3571 test the current module.
3572
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003573- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003574 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3575 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3576 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3577 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3578
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003579- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003580 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003581 Ward's Optik package.
3582
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003583- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3584 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3585 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3586 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3587
3588- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3589 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003590 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003591
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003592- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3593 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3594 shelf are binary pickles.
3595
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003596- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3597 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3598
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003599- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3600 modules are iterators now.
3601
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003602- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3603 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3604 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3605 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3606 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3607 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003608
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003609- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3610 with their entity value.
3611
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003612- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3613
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003614- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3615 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003616
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003617- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3618 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003619 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003620
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003621- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3622 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3623 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3624 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3625 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3626 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3627 main():
3628
3629 import locale
3630 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3631
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003632- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3633 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3634
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003635- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3636 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3637 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3638 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3639 to the new standard.
3640
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003641- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3642 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3643 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3644 an extension to the database.
3645
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003646- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3647 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3648 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3649 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003650 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003651
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003652- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003653 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003654
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003655- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3656 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3657 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3658 bounded integers.
3659
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003660- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3661 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3662 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3663 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3664 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3665 in existence.
3666
3667 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3668 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3669 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3670 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3671 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3672 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3673
3674 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3675 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3676 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3677 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3678
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003679- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3680 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3681 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3682
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003683- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3684
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003685- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3686 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3687 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3688 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3689
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003690- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3691 argument.
3692
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003693- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3694 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3695 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3696 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3697 [SF patch 560794].
3698
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003699- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3700 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3701 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003702 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3703 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3704 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003705
3706- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3707 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003708
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003709- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3710 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3711 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3712 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003713
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003714- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3715 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3716 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3717 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3718 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3719
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003720- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003721
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003722- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3723
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003724- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3725 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3726 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3727 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3728 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3729 identical to None.
3730
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003731- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3732 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3733 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3734 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3735 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3736 results now.
3737
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003738- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3739 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3740
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003741- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3742 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3743 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3744 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3745 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3746 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3747 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3748 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3749
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003750- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3751
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003752- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3753 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3754
3755- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3756 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3757 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3758 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3759 and other systems.
3760
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003761- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3762 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3763 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3764 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 +00003765 work well with these.
3766
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003767- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3768
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003769- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003770 connections.
3771
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003772- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3773 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3774 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3775
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003776- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3777 sets
3778
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003779- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3780 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3781 name.
3782
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003783- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3784 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3785 passed in.
3786
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003787- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003788 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003789 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3790 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003791
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003792- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3793
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003794- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3795
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003796- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3797 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3798 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3799
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003800- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3801 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3802 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3803 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003804 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003805
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003806- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003807 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003808 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003809
3810- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3811 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3812 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3813
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003814- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003815 the value of its expression argument.
3816
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003817- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3818 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3819 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3820
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003821- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3822 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3823 skipstone browser was included.
3824
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003825- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3826 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3827
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003828Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003829-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003830
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003831- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3832 names in addition to accepting file names.
3833
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003834- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3835 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3836 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3837 still used and useful.)
3838
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003839- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3840 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3841 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3842 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003843
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003844- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3845 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3846 the generated binary.
3847
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003848Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003849-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003850
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003851- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3852
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003853- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3854 except in the hands of experts.
3855
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003856- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003857 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3858 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3859 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003860
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003861- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3862 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3863 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3864 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3865 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3866 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3867 builds.
3868
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003869- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3870 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3871 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3872 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3873 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3874 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3875 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3876 new type.
3877
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003878- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003879
3880 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3881 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3882 positive infinities.
3883
3884 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3885 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3886 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3887 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3888 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3889 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3890 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3891
3892 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3893
3894 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3895
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003896- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3897 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3898 size of the executable.
3899
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003900- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3901 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3902 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3903 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003904
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003905- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3906
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003907- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3908 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3909 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003910
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003911- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3912 well as Unix.
3913
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003914- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3915 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3916 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3917 modules in the README file for details.
3918
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003919C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003920-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003921
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003922- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3923 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003924 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003925 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003926 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003927
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003928- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3929 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3930 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3931 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3932 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3933 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003934 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003935 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3936 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3937 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3938 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3939 aligned.)
3940
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003941- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3942 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3943 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3944
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003945- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3946 level.
3947
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003948- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3949 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3950 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3951 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3952 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3953
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003954- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3955 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3956 code.
3957
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003958- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3959 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3960 adjusting for negative indices.
3961
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003962- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3963 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3964 object.
3965
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003966- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3967 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3968 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3969
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003970- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3971 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003972
3973- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3974
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003975- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3976 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3977 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3978 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3979
3980- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3981
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003982- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003983
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003984- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003985 without going through the buffer API.
3986
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003987- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003988
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003989- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3990 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3991 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3992 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3993
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003994- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3995 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3996
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003997- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003998 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3999
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004000New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004001-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004002
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004003- OpenVMS is now supported.
4004
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004005- AtheOS is now supported.
4006
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004007- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4008
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004009- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4010
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004011Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004012-----
4013
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004014- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4015 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4016 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004017
4018Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004019-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004020
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004021- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4022 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4023 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4024 bugs.
4025 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004026 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004027 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4028 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004029 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004030
4031- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004032 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004033
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004034- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4035 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4036
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004037- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4038 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004039 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004040 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4041
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004042- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4043 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4044 use files" uninstall option).
4045
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004046- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4047
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004048- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4049 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4050
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004051- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4052 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4053 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4054
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004055- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4056 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4057 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4058 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4059 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004060 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4061 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4062 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004063
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004064- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004065 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004066 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4067 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4068 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4069 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4070 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4071 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4072 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4073 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4074 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4075 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4076 work around.
4077
4078- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4079 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4080 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4081 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4082 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4083 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4084 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4085 specified with O_CREAT too).
4086
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004087Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004088----
4089
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004090- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004091
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004092- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4093 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4094 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4095
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004096- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4097 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4098 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4099
4100- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4101 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4102 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4103 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4104 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4105 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4106 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4107 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004108
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004109- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4110 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4111 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004112
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004113- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4114 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4115 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4116 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4117 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004118
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004119- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4120 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4121 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004122
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004123- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4124 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004125
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004126- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4127 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4128 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4129 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4130 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004131
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004132- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4133 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4134 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4135
4136- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4137 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4138 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004139
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004140- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4141 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4142 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4143 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004144 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004145
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004146- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4147 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004148
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004149- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4150 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004151
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004152- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004153 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004154 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4155 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004156
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004157
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004158What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004159===============================
4160
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004161*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4162
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004163Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004164--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004165
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004166- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4167 with a custom metaclass.
4168
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004169Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004170-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004171
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004172- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4173 are proxies.
4174
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004175Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004176-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004177
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004178- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4179 very short strings.
4180
4181- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4182 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4183 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4184 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4185 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4186
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004187Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004188-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004189
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004190- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4191 close or delete time).
4192
4193- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4194 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4195
4196- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4197
4198- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004199 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004200
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004201Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004202-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004203
4204Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004205-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004206
4207C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004208-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004209
4210New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004211-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004212
4213Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004214-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004215
4216Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004217-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004218
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004219- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4220
4221- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4222 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4223
4224- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4225 deleted at process exit time.
4226
4227- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4228 in backslash.
4229
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004230Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004231----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004232
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004233- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4234 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4235 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4236
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004237
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004238What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004239===========================
4240
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004241*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4242
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004243Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004244--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004245
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004246- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4247 been extensively updated. See
4248
4249 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4250
4251 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4252
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004253- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4254 deleted!
4255
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004256- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4257 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4258 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4259 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4260 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4261
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004262- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4263
4264 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4265 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4266
4267 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4268 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4269 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4270 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4271 supported anyway.
4272
4273 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4274 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4275
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004276- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4277 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4278 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4279 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4280 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004281
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004282- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4283 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4284 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4285
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004286Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004287-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004288
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004289- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4290 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4291 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4292 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4293 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4294 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004295 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4296 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4297 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4298 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004299
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004300- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4301 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4302 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4303
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004304Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004305-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004306
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004307- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4308
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004309Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004310-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004311
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004312- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4313 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4314 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4315 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4316 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4317 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4318
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004319- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4320
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004321- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4322
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004323- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4324
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004325- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4326 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4327 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4328
4329- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4330
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004331Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004332-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004333
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004334- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4335 off a search on Google.
4336
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004337Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004338-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004339
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004340- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4341 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4342 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4343 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4344 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4345 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4346 other platforms should do likewise.
4347
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004348- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4349 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4350 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4351
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004352C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004353-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004354
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004355- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4356 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4357 producing key-value pairs.
4358
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004359- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004360 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004361 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4362 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4363 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4364 previously went unchallenged.
4365
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004366New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004367-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004368
4369Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004370-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004371
4372Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004373-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004374
4375Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004376----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004377
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004378- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4379 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004380
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004381- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4382 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4383 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4384 home.
4385
4386
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004387What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004388===========================
4389
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004390*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4391
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004392Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004393--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004394
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004395- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4396 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004397
4398 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004399 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004400
4401 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4402 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004403 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004404 This needs to be documented.
4405
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004406- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4407 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4408
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004409- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4410 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4411 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4412
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004413- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4414 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4415
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004416- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4417 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4418 class forbids it).
4419
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004420- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4421 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4422 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4423
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004424- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4425
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004426Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004427-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004428
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004429- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4430 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004431 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004432
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004433- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4434 (like 1 + '').
4435
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004436Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004437-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004438
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004439- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4440 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4441 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4442 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004443 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004444 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4445
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004446- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4447 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4448 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4449 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4450
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004451- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4452 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004453 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4454 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4455 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004456
4457- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4458 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004459
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004460- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4461 bytes on its input.
4462
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004463Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004464-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004465
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004466- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004467 convenience function.
4468
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004469- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4470 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4471 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004472 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4473 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4474 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4475 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4476 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4477 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004478
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004479- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4480 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4481 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4482 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4483
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004484- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4485 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4486 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4487
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004488- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4489 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4490 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4491 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4492
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004493- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4494 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004495 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004496 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4497 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4498 new -l and -e options.
4499
4500- statcache is now deprecated.
4501
4502- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4503 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004504 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004505 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4506 time properly taken into account.
4507
4508- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4509 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4510 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4511 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4512
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004513Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004514-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004515
4516Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004517-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004518
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004519- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4520 is built with libdb3 if available.
4521
4522- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4523
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004524C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004525-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004526
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004527- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4528 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4529 PySequence_Size().
4530
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004531- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4532
4533- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4534 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4535 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4536
4537- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4538 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4539
4540- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4541 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4542
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004543New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004544-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004545
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004546- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4547 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4548
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004549- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4550 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4551
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004552- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4553
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004554Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004555-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004556
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004557- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4558 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4559
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004560Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004561-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004562
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004563Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004564----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004565
4566- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4567 removed completely in the next release.
4568
4569- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4570 OSX.
4571
4572- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4573 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4574
4575- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4576
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004577
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004578What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004579===========================
4580
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004581*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4582
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004583Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004584--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004585
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004586- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004587 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004588 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004589 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4590 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004591 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4592 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004593 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4594 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004595
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004596- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4597 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4598
4599- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4600 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4601
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004602Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004603-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004604
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004605- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4606 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4607 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4608 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4609 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4610 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4611 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4612 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4613
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004614- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4615 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4616 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4617 example).
4618
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004619- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004620 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004621 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004622 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004623
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004624- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4625 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4626 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004627 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004628
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004629- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4630 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4631 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4632 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4633 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4634 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4635
4636 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4637
4638 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4639
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004640Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004641-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004642
4643- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4644
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004645- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4646
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004647- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4648 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004649
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004650- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4651 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4652 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4653 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4654 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4655 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004656 attributes.
4657
4658- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4659 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4660 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004661
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004662- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4663 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4664 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004665
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004666- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4667 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4668 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004669 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4670 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4671
4672- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4673 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004674
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004675Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004676-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004677
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004678- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4679 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4680
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004681- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4682 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4683 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4684 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4685
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004686- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4687 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4688 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4689 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4690
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004691 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4692 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4693 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4694 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4695 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4696 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4697 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4698 without losing information).
4699
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004700- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004701 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4702 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4703 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4704 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4705 module).
4706
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004707 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004708 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4709 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4710 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4711 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004712
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004713- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004714 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4715 encoding.
4716
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004717- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4718 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4719
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004720- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004721 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4722
4723- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4724 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4725 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4726 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4727
4728- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4729
4730- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4731 ON, and OFF.
4732
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004733- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4734 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4735
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004736Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004737-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004738
4739- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4740 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4741 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004742
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004743- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4744 been added: -X and -E.
4745
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004746Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004747-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004748
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004749- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4750 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4751
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004752C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004753-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004754
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004755- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4756 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4757 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4758 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4759 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4760
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004761- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4762 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4763 as long) arguments.
4764
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004765- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4766 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4767 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4768 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4769 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4770 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4771
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004772- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4773 input.
4774
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004775New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004776-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004777
4778Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004779-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004780
4781Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004782-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004783
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004784- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4785 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4786 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4787
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004788- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4789 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4790 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004791 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004792
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004793 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4794 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4795 import signal
4796 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004797
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004798 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004799 while 1:
4800 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004801 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004802 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4803 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4804 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4805 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004806
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004807
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004808What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4809===========================
4810
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004811*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4812
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004813Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004814--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004815
4816- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4817 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4818 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4819
4820- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4821 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4822 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4823 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4824 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4825 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4826 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004827
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004828- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004829 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004830 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4831 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4832 associate a docstring with a property.
4833
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004834- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4835 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4836 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4837 other built-in object types.
4838
4839- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4840 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4841 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4842 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4843 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4844
4845- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4846 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4847
4848- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4849 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004850 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004851 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4852 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4853 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4854 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4855 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4856
4857- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4858 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4859 class.
4860
4861- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4862 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4863 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4864 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4865
4866- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4867 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4868 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4869 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4870
4871- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4872 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4873
4874- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4875 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4876 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4877 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4878 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004879 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004880 with the same value as s.
4881
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004882- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4883
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004884Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004885----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004886
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004887- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4888
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004889- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4890 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4891 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4892 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4893 objects.
4894
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004895- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4896 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004897 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4898 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4899
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004900- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4901 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4902 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4903
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004904Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004905-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004906
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004907- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4908 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4909 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4910 by the instances.
4911
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004912- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4913 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4914 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4915
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004916- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4917 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4918 before the entire comparison is complete.
4919
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004920- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4921 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4922 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4923
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004924- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4925 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4926 getwriter().
4927
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004928- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4929 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4930
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004931- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004932 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4933 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4934
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004935- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4936 iterable object.
4937
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004938- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4939 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004940
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004941- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4942 authentication.
4943
4944- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4945 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004946
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004947- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004948 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4949 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4950 a sample driver.)
4951
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004952Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004953-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004954
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004955- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4956 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4957 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4958 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4959 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4960 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4961 kernel has large file support.
4962
4963- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4964 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4965 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4966 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4967 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4968
4969- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4970 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4971 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4972
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004973C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004974-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004975
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004976- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4977 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4978
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004979New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004980-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004981
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004982- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4983 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4984
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004985Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004986-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004987
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004988- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4989 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4990 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4991 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4992 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4993
4994- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4995 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4996 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4997 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4998
4999- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5000 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5001
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005002Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005003-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005004
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005005- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005006 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5007 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005008
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005009
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005010What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5011===========================
5012
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005013*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5014
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005015Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005016----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005017
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005018- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5019 big to represent as a C double.
5020
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005021- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5022 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5023 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5024 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5025 restriction).
5026
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005027- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5028 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5029 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5030 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5031 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5032
5033 >>> dir([])
5034 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5035 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5036 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5037 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5038 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5039 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5040 'reverse', 'sort']
5041
5042 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5043
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005044- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005045 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5046 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5047 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5048 OverflowError exception.
5049
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005050- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005051 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005052 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5053 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5054 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5055 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5056 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005057 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005058 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5059 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5060
5061 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5062 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5063 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5064 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005065
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005066- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005067 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5068 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5069 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5070 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5071 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5072 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5073 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5074 once it is created.
5075
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005076- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5077 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5078 (key, value) pairs.
5079
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005080- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005081 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5082 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5083
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005084- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5085 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5086 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5087 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5088 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005089
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005090- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005091 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5092 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5093
5094 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5095
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005096- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005097 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5098
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005099Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005100-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005101
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005102- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005103 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5104 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005105
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005106- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5107 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5108 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5109 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5110 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5111 in this area anymore).
5112
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005113- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5114 threading.Timer.
5115
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005116- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5117 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5118
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005119- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005120 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5121
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005122- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005123 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5124 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5125 converted to Python longs.
5126
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005127- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005128 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5129
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005130- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5131 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5132 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5133
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005134Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005135-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005136
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005137- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5138 division operators as per PEP 238.
5139
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005140Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005141-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005142
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005143- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5144 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5145 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5146 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5147
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005148C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005149-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005150
5151- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005152
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005153- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5154 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005155 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005156
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005157 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5158 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005159 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005160 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005161
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005162- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005163 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5164 module:
5165
5166 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005167
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005168 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5169 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005170
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005171 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5172 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005173
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005174 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5175
5176 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5177
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005178- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005179 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5180 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5181 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005182
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005183New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005184-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005185
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005186- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5187 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5188 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5189 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5190 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005191
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005192Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005193-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005194
5195Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005196-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005197
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005198- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5199 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5200 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5201 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005202 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5203 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5204 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5205 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5206 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005207
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005208- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005209 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5210
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005211
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005212What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5213===========================
5214
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005215*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5216
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005217Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005218-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005219
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005220- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5221 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5222
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005223- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5224 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5225 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005226
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005227- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5228 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5229 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5230 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005231
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005232- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5233
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005234- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005235
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005236Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005237-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005238
5239- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005240 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005241 the module docstring for details.
5242
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005243Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005244-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005245
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005246- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005247 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5248 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5249 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005250
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005251- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5252 Nick Mathewson.
5253
5254Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005255----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005256
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005257- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5258 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5259 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5260 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5261 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5262 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5263 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5264 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5265
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005266- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5267 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5268 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5269 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5270
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005271- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5272 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5273 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5274 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5275 come a long way).
5276
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005277- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5278 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5279 write filters for these warnings).
5280
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005281- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5282 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5283 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5284 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5285 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5286
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005287- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5288 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5289 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5290 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5291 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5292 older distribution.
5293
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005294Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005295-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005296
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005297- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5298 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005299 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005300
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005301- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5302 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5303 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5304
5305- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5306
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005307- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5308
5309- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5310
5311- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5312
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005313- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005314
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005315- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5316
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005317New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005318-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005319
5320C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005321-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005322
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005323- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5324 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5325 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5326 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5327 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5328 against buffer overruns.
5329
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005330- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005331 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5332 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005333 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5334 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5335 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5336
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005337- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5338 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5339 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5340 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5341 deprecated.
5342
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005343Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005344-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005345
5346- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5347 relevant is found.
5348
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005349
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005350What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005351===========================
5352
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005353*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5354
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005355Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005356----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005357
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005358- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5359 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5360 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5361 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5362 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5363 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5364 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5365 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005366 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005367 repaired.
5368
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005369- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005370 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005371 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5372 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5373 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5374 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5375 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5376 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5377 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5378 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5379
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005380- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5381 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5382 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5383 leading BMO character).
5384
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005385- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5386 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5387 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5388
5389 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5390 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5391 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005392
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005393 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5394 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5395 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5396 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5397 for various simple to use conversions.
5398
5399 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5400 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5401
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005402 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5403 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5404 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5405 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5406 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5407 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5408 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5409 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5410 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5411 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5412 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5413 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5414 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5415 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5416 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005417
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005418- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5419 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5420 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005421 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005422 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005423
5424 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005425 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5426 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5427 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5428 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5429 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005430 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5431 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005432
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005433 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5434 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5435 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005436 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005437
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005438- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5439 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5440 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5441 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5442 floating arithmetic,
5443
5444 x = 9007199254740992.0
5445 print long(x)
5446
5447 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5448 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5449 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5450 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5451 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5452 functions are of good quality).
5453
5454 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5455 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5456 algorithms to break.
5457
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005458- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5459 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5460 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5461 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5462 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5463 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5464 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5465 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5466 order.
5467
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005468- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5469 operation along the most common code paths.
5470
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005471- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5472 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5473
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005474- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5475 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5476 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5477 {}.update(UserDict())
5478
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005479- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5480 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5481 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5482 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5483 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5484 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5485 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5486 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5487
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005488- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005489 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005490
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005491 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005492 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5493 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005494 join() method of strings
5495 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005496 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5497 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005498 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005499 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005500
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005501- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5502 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5503
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005504- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5505 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5506
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005507- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5508 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5509 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5510 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5511
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005512- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5513 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005514 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005515 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5516 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005517
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005518- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5519
5520
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005521Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005522-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005523
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005524- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005525 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005526 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5527 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5528
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005529- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5530 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5531
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005532- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5533 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5534 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5535 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5536
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005537- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5538 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5539 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5540
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005541- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5542
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005543- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5544
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005545- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5546 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5547 that are still imported into string.py).
5548
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005549- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5550
5551- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5552 Now it does.
5553
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005554- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5555
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005556- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5557 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5558 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5559 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5560 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005561 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5562 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005563
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005564- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5565 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5566 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5567 'help(object)'.
5568
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005569Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005570-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005571
5572- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005573 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005574 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5575 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5576
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005577- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005578 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5579 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005580
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005581C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005582-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005583
5584- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5585 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005586
5587----
5588
5589**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**