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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +000015- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
16 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
17 be there.
18
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +000019- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
20 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
21 the LC_NUMERIC category.
22
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +000023- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
24 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
25 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
26
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +000027- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
28
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +000029- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
30 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
31 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +000032
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +000033- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
34 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
35
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +000036- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
37
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000038- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
39 new documentation and modified profiler and bdb modules for more details
40
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +000041- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
42
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +000043- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
44
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +000045- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
46 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
47
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +000048- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
49 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
50 Fixes bug #858016 .
51
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000052- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
53 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
54 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
55
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000056- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
57 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
58 improves their performance (about 35%).
59
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000060- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
61 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
62 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
63
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000064- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
65 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
66 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
67 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
68
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000069- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
70 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
71 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
72 length is not known).
73
74- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
75 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000076 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
77 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000078 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
79
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +000080- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
81 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
82
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000083- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
84 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
85 keyword arguments.
86
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000087- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
88 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
89 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
90
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000091- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
92 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
93 cases.
94
95- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
96 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
97 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
98 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
99 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
100 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
101 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
102 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
103 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
104 a release build.
105
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000106- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
107 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
108
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000109- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000110 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000111
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000112- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
113 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
114 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
115 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
116 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
117 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
118 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
119 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
120 destroyed.
121
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000122- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
123 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
124 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
125 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
126 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
127 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
128 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
129 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
130
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000131- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
132 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
133 character other than a space.
134
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000135- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
136 by the function object or by the method object, the function
137 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
138 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
139 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
140 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
141 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
142 attributes with the same name.
143
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000144- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
145 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
146 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
147 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
148 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
149 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
150 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
151 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
152 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
153 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
154 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
155 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
156 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
157 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000158
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000159- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
160 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
161 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
162 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
163 This has been repaired.
164
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000165- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
166
167- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
168
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000169- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
170 over a sequence.
171
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000172- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000173 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000174
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000175- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
176
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000177- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
178 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
179 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
180 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
181 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
182 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
183 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
184 records with equal keys is unchanged).
185
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000186- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
187 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
188 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
189
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000190- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
191 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
192 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
193 freelist.
194
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000195- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
196 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
197
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000198- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
199 number.
200
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000201- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
202 a TypeError exception.
203
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000204- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
205 820195.
206
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000207- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
208 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
209 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
210
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000211- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
212 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
213 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000214
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000215- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
216 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
217 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
218
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000219- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
220 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000221 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000222
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000223- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000224 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
225 the first call.
226
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000227
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000228Extension modules
229-----------------
230
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000231- time module code that deals with time_t timestamps will now raise a
232 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision from time_t being less
233 precise than a double. Closes bug #919012.
234
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000235- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
236
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000237- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
238
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000239- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
240 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
241
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000242- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
243 fewer false positives.
244
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000245- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
246 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
247
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000248- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
249 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
250
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000251- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
252 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000253 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
254 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
255 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000256
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000257- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
258 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
259 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
260 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
261
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000262- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
263 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
264 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
265 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
266 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
267 #897625.
268
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000269- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
270 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
271
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000272- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
273 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
274 and pops on either side of the deque.
275
276- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
277 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
278
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000279- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
280 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
281 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
282 other functions that expect a function argument.
283
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000284- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
285
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000286- os.getsid was added.
287
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000288- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
289 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
290 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
291
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000292- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
293
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000294- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
295
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000296- readline.clear_history was added.
297
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000298- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
299
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000300- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
301
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000302- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
303
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000304- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
305
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000306- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
307
308- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
309
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000310- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
311
312- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
313
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000314- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
315 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
316 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
317
318- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
319 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
320 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
321 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
322 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
323 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
324 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
325
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000326- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
327 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
328 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
329 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000330
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000331- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
332 iterators from a single iterable.
333
334- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
335 of raising a TypeError exception.
336
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000337- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
338 as parameter.
339
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000340Library
341-------
342
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000343- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
344
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000345- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000346 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000347
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000348- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
349 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
350
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000351- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
352
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000353- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
354 on cygwin and mingw32.
355
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000356- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
357
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000358- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
359 module.
360
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000361- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
362 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
363 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
364
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000365- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
366 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
367 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
368
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000369- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
370
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000371- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
372
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000373- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
374 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
375
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000376- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
377 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
378 type pattern with the same value exists.
379
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000380- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
381 when run from the command prompt).
382
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000383- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
384 not taken into consideration when caching value.
385
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000386- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
387 default sort).
388
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000389- Added global runctx function to profile module
390
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000391- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
392
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000393- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
394
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000395- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
396
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000397- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
398 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
399 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
400 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
401 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
402 accordingly.
403
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000404- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
405 decoding standards.
406
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000407- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
408 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
409 called for all requests.
410
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000411- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
412 they are passed to the compiler.
413
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000414- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
415 indent, width and depth.
416
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000417- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
418 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
419
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000420- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
421 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
422
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000423- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
424
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000425- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
426
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000427- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
428
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000429- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
430 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
431
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000432- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000433 for better performance.
434
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000435- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000436
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000437- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
438 a string).
439
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000440- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
441
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000442- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
443
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000444- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
445
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000446- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
447
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000448- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
449 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
450 list of fieldnames.
451
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000452- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
453 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
454
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000455- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
456
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000457- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
458 empty lists.
459
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000460- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
461 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
462 and shelves.
463
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000464- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
465 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
466
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000467- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000468 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
469 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000470
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000471- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
472 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000473 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000474
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000475- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000476 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
477 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
478
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000479- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
480 and removed in Py2.4.
481
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000482- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
483
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000484- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
485
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000486Tools/Demos
487-----------
488
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000489- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
490 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
491
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000492- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
493
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000494- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
495 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
496 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
497 destination in situations where both files are given.
498
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000499- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
500 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
501 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
502 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
503
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000504- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
505
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000506- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
507 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
508 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
509 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
510 now.
511
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000512- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
513 in effect
514
515- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
516 C-c C-h
517
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000518- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
519 -d option was given.
520
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000521Build
522-----
523
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000524- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
525 --enable-profiling.
526
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000527- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
528 is configured --with-tsc.
529
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000530- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
531 on AMD64.
532
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000533- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
534 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
535
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000536- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
537 removed.
538
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000539- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
540 supported (see PEP 11).
541
542- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
543
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000544- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
545
546- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
547 (see PEP 11).
548
549- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
550 sizeof(char) must be 1.
551
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000552C API
553-----
554
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000555- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
556 generator objects.
557
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000558- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
559 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000560 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
561 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000562
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000563- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
564 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
565
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000566- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
567 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
568 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
569 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
570 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
571
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000572- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
573 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
574 about 10% faster.
575
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000576- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
577 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
578
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000579- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
580 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
581 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
582 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
583
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000584New platforms
585-------------
586
587Tests
588-----
589
590Windows
591-------
592
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000593- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
594 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
595 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
596 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
597
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000598- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
599 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
600 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
601
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000602Mac
603----
604
605
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000606What's New in Python 2.3 final?
607===============================
608
609*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
610
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000611IDLE
612----
613
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000614- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
615 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
616 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
617 context-menu actions.
618
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000619- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
620 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
621 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
622 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
623 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
624 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
625 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
626 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
627 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
628
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000629
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000630What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
631=============================================
632
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000633*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000634
635Core and builtins
636-----------------
637
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000638- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000639 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000640 comment at the end are still unsupported.
641
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000642Extension modules
643-----------------
644
645- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
646 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
647 than once. This has been fixed.
648
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000649- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
650 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
651 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
652 call.
653
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000654- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
655
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000656Library
657-------
658
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000659- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
660 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
661
662- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
663 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
664 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
665 restored.
666
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000667IDLE
668----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000669
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000670- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000671
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000672Build
673-----
674
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000675- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
676 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
677
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000678C API
679-----
680
681Windows
682-------
683
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000684- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
685 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
686
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000687- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
688
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000689Mac
690---
691
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000692- Various fixes to pimp.
693
694- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
695
696- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
697 more problems than it solves.
698
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000699
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000700What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
701=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000702
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000703*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
704
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000705Core and builtins
706-----------------
707
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000708- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
709 by sys.setcheckinterval().
710
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000711- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
712 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000713 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000714
715- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
716 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
717 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000718 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000719
720- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
721 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000722
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000723- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
724 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
725 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
726
727- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000728 770247.
729
730- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000731
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000732Extension modules
733-----------------
734
735- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
736 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
737
738- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
739
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000740- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
741
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000742- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
743 contained within the _strptime module.
744
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000745- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
746 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
747
748- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000749 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
750
751- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
752 the find_class attribute, if present.
753
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000754- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000755
756 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
757 (SF bug 763298).
758
759 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000760 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
761 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
762 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000763
764 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
765
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000766Library
767-------
768
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000769- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
770
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000771- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
772 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
773 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
774 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
775 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
776 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
777 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
778 or Tester().
779
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000780- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
781 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
782 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
783 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
784 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
785 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
786 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
787 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
788 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000789
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000790 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000791
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000792- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
793 weren't before was an oversight.
794
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000795- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
796 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
797
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000798- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
799 when there are no lines.
800
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000801- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
802 which could occur with Tk 8.4
803
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000804- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
805 to child processes.
806
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000807- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
808
809- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
810
811- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
812 xmlrpclib.
813
814- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
815 responses.
816
817- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
818 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
819
820- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
821 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
822 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
823
824- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
825 used as patterns.
826
827- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
828 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
829 than Tk 8.3.
830
831- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
832
833- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000834
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000835Tools/Demos
836-----------
837
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000838- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
839
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000840- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
841
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000842- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000843
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000844Build
845-----
846
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000847- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
848
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000849- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
850
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000851- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
852 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000853
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000854- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
855 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
856 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000857
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000858C API
859-----
860
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000861- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
862 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
863
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000864Windows
865-------
866
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000867- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
868 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
869 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
870 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
871 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
872 Python exception ::
873
874 thread.error: can't start new thread
875
876 is raised now.
877
878- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
879 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
880 instead of from DLL teardown.
881
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000882Mac
883---
884
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000885- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000886 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000887 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
888 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
889 the executable in the bundle.
890
891- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000892
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000893- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
894
895- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
896 on Panther.
897
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000898What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
899================================
900
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000901*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000902
903Core and builtins
904-----------------
905
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000906- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
907 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
908 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
909 with the -i option.
910
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000911- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
912 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
913
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000914- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
915 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
916
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000917- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
918 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
919 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
920 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
921 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
922 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
923 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
924 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
925 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
926 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
927 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
928 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
929 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000930
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000931- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
932 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
933 embedded in a lambda expression.
934
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000935- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
936 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
937 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
938 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
939 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
940
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000941- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
942 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
943 matches the restriction on classic classes.
944
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000945- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
946 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
947
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000948- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
949 It's writable again.
950
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000951- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
952 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
953 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000954 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000955
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000956- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
957 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
958 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
959
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000960Extension modules
961-----------------
962
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000963- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
964 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
965
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000966- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
967 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
968 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
969 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
970
971- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
972 collection.
973
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000974- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
975 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
976 unique within a single program run.
977
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000978- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
979 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
980
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000981- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
982 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
983
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000984- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
985 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000986
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000987- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
988
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000989- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
990 Fixes SF bug #730685.
991
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000992- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
993 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
994 for many BSD-derived systems.
995
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000996
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000997Library
998-------
999
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001000- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1001 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1002 primary ones:
1003
1004 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1005 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1006 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1007
1008 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1009 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1010 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1011 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1012 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1013 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1014
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001015- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1016 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1017 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1018 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1019 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1020 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1021 argument.
1022
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001023- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1024 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1025 in the archive.
1026
1027- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1028 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1029
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001030- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1031 569574).
1032
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001033- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1034 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1035 no more.
1036
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001037- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1038 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1039 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1040 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1041 code coverage.
1042
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001043- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1044 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1045 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001046 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1047 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001048
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001049- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1050 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1051 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001052 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001053
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001054- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1055
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001056- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1057 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1058 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1059 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1060
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001061- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1062 handling.
1063
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001064- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1065 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1066
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001067- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1068 in socket.py.
1069
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001070- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1071
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001072- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1073 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1074 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1075 opener with proxy support.
1076
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001077- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1078
1079- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1080
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001081Tools/Demos
1082-----------
1083
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001084- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1085
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001086- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1087
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001088- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1089 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001090
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001091- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1092 files.
1093
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001094Build
1095-----
1096
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001097- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001098 different root directory.
1099
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001100C API
1101-----
1102
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001103- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1104 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1105 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1106 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1107 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1108 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1109 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1110 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1111 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1112 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1113
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001114- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1115 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1116 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1117 from Python.
1118
1119
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001120New platforms
1121-------------
1122
1123None this time.
1124
1125Tests
1126-----
1127
1128- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1129 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1130
1131Windows
1132-------
1133
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001134- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1135
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001136- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1137 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1138 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1139 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1140 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1141 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1142 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1143 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1144 that's what it's for.
1145
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001146Mac
1147---
1148
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001149- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1150 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1151 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1152 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001153- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1154 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1155- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001156
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001157SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1158------------------------------------
1159
1160430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1161598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1162622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1163661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1164683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1165697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1166713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1167724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1168727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1169729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1170730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1171731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1172732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1173733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1174735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1175740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1176744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1177745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1178747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1179749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1180751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1181753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1182755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1183757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1184760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1185
1186
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001187What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1188================================
1189
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001190*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001191
1192Core and builtins
1193-----------------
1194
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001195- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1196 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1197
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001198- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1199 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1200 and cannot be strings).
1201
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001202- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1203 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1204 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1205 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1206
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001207- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1208 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1209 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1210 Python itself.
1211
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001212- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1213 the referenced object, if it has one.
1214
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001215- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1216 the thread started at
1217 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1218
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001219- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1220 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1221 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1222 placed on a list index.
1223
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001224- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1225 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1226 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1227 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1228
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001229- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1230 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1231 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1232 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1233 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1234 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1235 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1236
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001237- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1238 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1239 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1240 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1241 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1242
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001243- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1244 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001245
1246- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1247 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1248 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1249 #693195.)
1250
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001251- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1252 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001253
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001254- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001255 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001256 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1257 interpreter executions, would fail.
1258
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001259- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001260 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001261 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001262
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001263Extension modules
1264-----------------
1265
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001266- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1267 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1268 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1269 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1270
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001271- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1272 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1273
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001274- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1275 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1276 and Greg Chapman.)
1277
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001278- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1279 recursively.
1280
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001281- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001282 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1283 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1284 leaks.
1285
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001286- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1287
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001288- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1289 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1290 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1291 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1292 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1293 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1294 #705836.
1295
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001296- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001297 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1298
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001299- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1300 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1301 See SF bug #692416.
1302
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001303- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1304 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1305
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001306- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1307 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1308 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001309
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001310- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001311 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1312 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1313
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001314- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1315 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1316 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1317 timeouts to work properly.
1318
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001319Library
1320-------
1321
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001322- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1323 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1324 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1325 future release.
1326
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001327- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1328 for querying platform dependent features.
1329
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001330- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001331
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001332- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1333 pickle protocol versions.
1334
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001335- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1336 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1337 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1338
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001339- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1340
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001341- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1342 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1343 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1344 modules.
1345
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001346- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1347 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1348 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1349
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001350- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1351 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1352
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001353- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1354 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1355 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1356
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001357- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001358 MS Office extensions.
1359
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001360- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1361 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1362
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001363- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1364 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1365
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001366- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1367 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1368 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1369 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1370 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1371 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1372
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001373- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1374 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1375 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001376
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001377- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1378 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1379 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1380
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001381- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1382
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001383- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1384 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1385 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1386
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001387Tools/Demos
1388-----------
1389
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001390- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1391 See the module docstring for details.
1392
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001393Build
1394-----
1395
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001396- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1397 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001398
1399C API
1400-----
1401
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001402- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1403
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001404- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1405 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1406 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1407
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001408- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1409 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001410
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001411 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1412 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1413 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001414
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001415- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001416 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1417
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001418- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1419 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1420 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001421
1422New platforms
1423-------------
1424
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001425None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001426
1427Tests
1428-----
1429
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001430- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1431 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001432
1433Windows
1434-------
1435
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001436- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1437 function.
1438
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001439- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1440 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001441
1442Mac
1443---
1444
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001445- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1446 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001447
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001448- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1449 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001450
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001451- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1452 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1453 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001454
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001455- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001456 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1457 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001458
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001459- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1460 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001461
1462
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001463What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1464=================================
1465
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001466*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001467
1468Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001469-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001470
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001471- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1472 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1473 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1474
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001475- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1476 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1477 (SF patch #664376.)
1478
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001479- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1480 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1481 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1482 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1483 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1484 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001485 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001486
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001487- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1488 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1489 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1490 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001491 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001492
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001493- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1494 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1495 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1496 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1497 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1498 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1499 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1500 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1501 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1502 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1503 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1504
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001505- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1506 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1507 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1508 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1509 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1510 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1511
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001512- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1513 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1514
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001515- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1516 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1517 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1518 case.)
1519
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001520- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1521 passed as unicode strings.
1522
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001523- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1524 See SF bug #683467.
1525
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001526- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1527 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1528
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001529- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1530
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001531- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1532
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001533- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1534 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1535 arguments.
1536
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001537- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1538 See SF bug #667147.
1539
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001540- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001541 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001542 See SF bug #676155.
1543
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001544- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001545 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001546 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1547 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1548 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1549 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1550 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1551 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001552
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001553Extension modules
1554-----------------
1555
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001556- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1557 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1558 tp_as_number pointer.
1559
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001560- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1561 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1562 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1563 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1564 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1565
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001566- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1567
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001568- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1569
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001570- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001571 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001572 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1573 patch #678531.)
1574
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001575- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1576 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1577
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001578- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1579 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1580
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001581- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1582
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001583- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1584 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1585 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1586
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001587- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1588
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001589- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1590 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1591
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001592- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001593
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001594- datetime changes:
1595
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001596 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1597
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001598 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1599 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1600 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1601 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1602 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1603 now.
1604
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001605 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001606 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1607 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001608
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001609 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001610 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001611 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1612 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1613 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1614 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001615
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001616 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1617 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1618 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001619 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1620
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001621 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1622 by a later example coded by Guido.
1623
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001624 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001625 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1626 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1627 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001628 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1629 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1630
1631 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1632 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1633 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1634 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1635 tzinfo subclass instance.
1636
1637 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1638 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1639 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1640 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1641 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1642 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1643 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1644 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001645
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001646 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1647 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1648 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1649 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1650 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001651 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1652
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001653 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001654
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001655 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1656 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1657 as a naive datetime object.
1658
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001659 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1660 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1661 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1662
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001663 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1664 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1665 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1666 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1667 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1668 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1669 comparison.
1670
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001671 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1672 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1673 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1674 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001675 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001676
1677 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001678
1679 and ::
1680
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001681 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1682
1683 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1684 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1685 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1686 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1687
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001688 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1689 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1690 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1691 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1692 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1693
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001694 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1695 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001696 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1697 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001698
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001699Library
1700-------
1701
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001702- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1703 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1704
1705- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1706 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1707 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1708 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1709 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1710 See PEP 307 for details.
1711
1712- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1713 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1714
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001715- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1716 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001717 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001718 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1719 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001720 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001721
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001722- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1723 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1724
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001725- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1726 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1727 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1728
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001729- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1730
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001731- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1732 exception.
1733
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001734- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1735 class.
1736
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001737- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1738 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1739 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1740
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001741- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1742 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1743
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001744- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001745 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1746 See SF bug #659228.
1747
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001748- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1749 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1750 See SF patch #651082.
1751
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001752- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001753
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001754- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1755 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1756
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001757- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001758 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001759
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001760- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1761 DOS paths from other platforms.
1762
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001763Tools/Demos
1764-----------
1765
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001766- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1767 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1768 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1769 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1770 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1771 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1772 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1773 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1774 example:
1775
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001776 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1777 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001778
1779 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1780
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001781
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001782Build
1783-----
1784
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001785- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1786 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1787 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001788 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1789
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001790 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1791
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001792- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1793 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1794 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1795 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1796 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1797 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1798 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1799 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1800 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1801
1802- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1803 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1804 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1805 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1806
1807- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1808 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1809
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001810C API
1811-----
1812
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001813- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1814 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001815
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001816- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1817 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1818 tp_as_number pointer.
1819
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001820- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1821 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1822 (SF #681367)
1823
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001824- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1825 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1826 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1827 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001828
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001829Tests
1830-----
1831
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001832- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001833 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1834 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1835 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1836 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1837 pydoc.)
1838
1839- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1840
1841- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001842
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001843Windows
1844-------
1845
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001846- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1847 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1848 time).
1849
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001850- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1851 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1852
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001853- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1854 release without strong cryptography.
1855
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001856- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001857 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001858
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001859- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1860 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1861
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001862Mac
1863---
1864
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001865- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1866 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001867
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001868- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1869 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1870 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001871
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001872- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1873 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001874
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001875- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1876 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1877 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1878 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001879
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001880- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001881 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1882 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1883 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001884
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001885
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001886What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001887=================================
1888
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001889*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001890
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001891Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001892--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001893
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001894- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1895
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001896- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1897 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001898 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001899 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001900 a different meaning than before.
1901
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001902- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001903 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001904 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001905
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001906- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001907 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001908 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001909
1910- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1911 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1912 and deallocation.
1913
1914- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1915 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1916
1917- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1918 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1919 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1920 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1921 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1922
1923- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1924 now detected by the garbage collector.
1925
1926- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1927 [SF bug 519621]
1928
1929- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1930 identifier.
1931
1932- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1933 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1934 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1935 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1936 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1937 [SF bug 563060]
1938
1939- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1940 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1941 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1942 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1943 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1944
1945- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1946 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1947 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1948
1949- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1950
1951- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1952 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1953 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1954 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1955 state of the slots would be lost.)
1956
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001957Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001958-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001959
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001960- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001961 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1962 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1963 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1964 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001965 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1966 Jython 2.1.
1967
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001968- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001969 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001970 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1971 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1972 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1973 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1974 these, see PEP 302.
1975
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001976- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1977 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1978 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1979
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001980- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1981 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1982 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1983
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001984- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1985 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1986 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1987
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001988- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1989 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1990 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1991 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1992 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1993 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1994 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1995 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1996 releases or implementations.
1997
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001998- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001999 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2000 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002001
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002002- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2003 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2004
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002005- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2006 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2007 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2008
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002009- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2010 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2011
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002012- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2013 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002014 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2015 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002016
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002017- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2018 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2019 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2020 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2021 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2022
2023 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2024 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2025 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2026 pattern.
2027
2028 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2029 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2030 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2031 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2032
2033 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2034 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2035 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2036 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2037 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2038 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2039
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002040- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2041 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2042 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2043 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2044 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2045 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2046 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2047 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002048
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002049- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2050 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2051 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2052 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2053 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002054 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2055 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2056 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2057 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2058 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2059 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2060 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002061
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002062- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2063 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2064
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002065- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2066 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2067 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2068 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2069 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2070 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2071 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2072 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2073 to Zack Weinberg!
2074
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002075- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2076 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2077 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2078 type. This has been fixed now.
2079
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002080- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2081 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2082 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2083
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002084- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2085 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2086 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2087 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2088 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2089 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2090 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2091 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002092 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002093
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002094- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2095 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2096 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002097
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002098- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2099 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2100 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2101 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2102 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2103 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2104 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2105 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002106 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002107 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2108 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2109
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002110- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2111 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2112 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2113 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2114 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2115 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2116 this.)
2117
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002118- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2119 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002120 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002121 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002122 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2123 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002124 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2125 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002126
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002127- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2128 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2129 currently running.
2130
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002131- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2132 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2133 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2134 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2135
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002136- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2137 as directory names.
2138
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002139- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2140 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2141
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002142- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2143 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2144
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002145- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002146 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2147 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002148
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002149- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2150 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2151 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2152 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2153 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2154
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002155- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2156 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2157 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2158 removed.
2159
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002160- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2161 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2162 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2163
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002164- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2165 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2166 to __debug__.
2167
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002168- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2169 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2170 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2171
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002172- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2173 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2174 deprecated now.
2175
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002176- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2177 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2178 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002179
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002180- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2181 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2182 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2183 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2184 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002185
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002186- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2187 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2188
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002189- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2190 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2191 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002192 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002193 is backward compatible.
2194
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002195- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2196 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2197 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2198 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2199 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2200
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002201- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2202 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2203 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2204 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2205 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2206 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002207
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002208- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2209 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2210
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002211- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2212 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2213
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002214- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2215 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2216 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2217 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2218 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2219
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002220- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2221 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2222 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2223
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002224- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002225 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2226
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002227- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2228 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2229 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002230
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002231- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2232 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2233
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002234- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2235 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2236 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2237
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002238- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2239
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002240Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002241-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002242
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002243- Added three operators to the operator module:
2244 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2245 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2246 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2247
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002248- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2249
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002250- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2251 archives.
2252
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002253- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2254 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2255 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2256
2257 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2258
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002259- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2260 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2261 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002262 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002263
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002264- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2265 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2266 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2267 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002268 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2269 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2270 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2271 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002272
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002273- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2274 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002275
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002276- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2277
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002278- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2279 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2280
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002281- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2282 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2283 supported.
2284
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002285- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2286
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002287- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2288 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002289
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002290- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2291 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2292
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002293- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2294
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002295- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2296 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2297
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002298- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2299 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2300 functions but callable type objects.
2301
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002302- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002303 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002304 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002305
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002306- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2307 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002308
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002309- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2310 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002311
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002312- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2313 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2314 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2315 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2316
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002317- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2318 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002319
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002320- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2321 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2322 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2323 and __imul__.
2324
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002325- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002326 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2327 is called.
2328
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002329- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2330 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2331 interpreter was compiled.
2332
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002333- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2334 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2335 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002336 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002337 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2338 1, not 2.
2339
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002340- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2341 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2342 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2343 limit.
2344
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002345- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2346 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2347 bug #623464.
2348
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002349- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2350 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2351 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2352 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2353
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002354Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002355-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002356
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002357- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2358
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002359- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2360 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2361 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2362 with Python 2.3a2.
2363
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002364- os.path exposes getctime.
2365
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002366- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002367 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002368 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002369 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002370 unit tests of floating point results.
2371
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002372- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2373 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2374 has been increased.
2375
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002376- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2377 executed.
2378
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002379- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2380 postinstallation script.
2381
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002382- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2383 test the current module.
2384
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002385- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002386 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2387 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2388 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2389 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2390
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002391- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002392 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002393 Ward's Optik package.
2394
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002395- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2396 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2397 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2398 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2399
2400- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2401 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002402 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002403
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002404- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2405 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2406 shelf are binary pickles.
2407
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002408- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2409 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2410
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002411- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2412 modules are iterators now.
2413
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002414- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2415 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2416 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2417 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2418 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2419 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002420
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002421- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2422 with their entity value.
2423
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002424- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2425
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002426- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2427 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002428
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002429- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2430 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002431 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002432
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002433- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2434 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2435 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2436 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2437 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2438 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2439 main():
2440
2441 import locale
2442 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2443
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002444- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2445 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2446
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002447- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2448 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2449 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2450 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2451 to the new standard.
2452
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002453- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2454 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2455 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2456 an extension to the database.
2457
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002458- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2459 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2460 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2461 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002462 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002463
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002464- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002465 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002466
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002467- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2468 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2469 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2470 bounded integers.
2471
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002472- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2473 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2474 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2475 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2476 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2477 in existence.
2478
2479 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2480 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2481 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2482 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2483 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2484 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2485
2486 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2487 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2488 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2489 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2490
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002491- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2492 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2493 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2494
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002495- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2496
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002497- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2498 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2499 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2500 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2501
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002502- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2503 argument.
2504
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002505- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2506 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2507 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2508 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2509 [SF patch 560794].
2510
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002511- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2512 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2513 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002514 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2515 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2516 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002517
2518- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2519 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002520
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002521- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2522 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2523 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2524 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002525
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002526- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2527 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2528 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2529 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2530 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2531
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002532- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002533
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002534- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2535
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002536- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2537 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2538 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2539 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2540 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2541 identical to None.
2542
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002543- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2544 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2545 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2546 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2547 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2548 results now.
2549
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002550- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2551 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2552
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002553- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2554 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2555 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2556 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2557 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2558 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2559 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2560 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2561
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002562- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2563
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002564- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2565 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2566
2567- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2568 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2569 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2570 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2571 and other systems.
2572
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002573- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2574 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2575 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2576 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 +00002577 work well with these.
2578
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002579- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2580
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002581- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002582 connections.
2583
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002584- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2585 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2586 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2587
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002588- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2589 sets
2590
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002591- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2592 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2593 name.
2594
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002595- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2596 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2597 passed in.
2598
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002599- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002600 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002601 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2602 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002603
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002604- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2605
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002606- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2607
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002608- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2609 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2610 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2611
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002612- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2613 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2614 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2615 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002616 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002617
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002618- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002619 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002620 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002621
2622- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2623 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2624 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2625
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002626- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002627 the value of its expression argument.
2628
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002629- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2630 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2631 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2632
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002633- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2634 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2635 skipstone browser was included.
2636
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002637- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2638 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2639
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002640Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002641-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002642
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002643- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2644 names in addition to accepting file names.
2645
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002646- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2647 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2648 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2649 still used and useful.)
2650
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002651- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2652 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2653 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2654 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002655
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002656- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2657 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2658 the generated binary.
2659
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002660Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002661-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002662
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002663- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2664
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002665- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2666 except in the hands of experts.
2667
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002668- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002669 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2670 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2671 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002672
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002673- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2674 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2675 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2676 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2677 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2678 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2679 builds.
2680
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002681- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2682 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2683 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2684 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2685 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2686 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2687 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2688 new type.
2689
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002690- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002691
2692 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2693 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2694 positive infinities.
2695
2696 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2697 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2698 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2699 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2700 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2701 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2702 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2703
2704 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2705
2706 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2707
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002708- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2709 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2710 size of the executable.
2711
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002712- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2713 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2714 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2715 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002716
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002717- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2718
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002719- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2720 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2721 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002722
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002723- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2724 well as Unix.
2725
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002726- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2727 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2728 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2729 modules in the README file for details.
2730
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002731C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002732-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002733
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002734- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2735 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002736 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002737 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002738 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002739
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002740- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2741 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2742 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2743 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2744 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2745 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002746 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002747 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2748 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2749 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2750 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2751 aligned.)
2752
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002753- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2754 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2755 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2756
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002757- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2758 level.
2759
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002760- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2761 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2762 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2763 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2764 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2765
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002766- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2767 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2768 code.
2769
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002770- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2771 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2772 adjusting for negative indices.
2773
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002774- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2775 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2776 object.
2777
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002778- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2779 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2780 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2781
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002782- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2783 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002784
2785- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2786
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002787- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2788 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2789 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2790 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2791
2792- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2793
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002794- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002795
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002796- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002797 without going through the buffer API.
2798
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002799- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002800
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002801- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2802 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2803 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2804 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2805
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002806- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2807 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2808
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002809- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002810 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2811
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002812New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002813-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002814
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002815- OpenVMS is now supported.
2816
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002817- AtheOS is now supported.
2818
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002819- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2820
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002821- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2822
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002823Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002824-----
2825
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002826- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2827 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2828 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002829
2830Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002831-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002832
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002833- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2834 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2835 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2836 bugs.
2837 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002838 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002839 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2840 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002841 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002842
2843- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002844 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002845
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002846- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2847 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2848
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002849- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2850 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002851 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002852 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2853
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002854- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2855 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2856 use files" uninstall option).
2857
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002858- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2859
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002860- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2861 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2862
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002863- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2864 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2865 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2866
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002867- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2868 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2869 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2870 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2871 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002872 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2873 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2874 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002875
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002876- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002877 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002878 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2879 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2880 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2881 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2882 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2883 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2884 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2885 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2886 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2887 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2888 work around.
2889
2890- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2891 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2892 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2893 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2894 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2895 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2896 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2897 specified with O_CREAT too).
2898
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002899Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002900----
2901
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002902- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002903
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002904- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2905 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2906 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2907
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002908- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2909 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2910 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2911
2912- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2913 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2914 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2915 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2916 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2917 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2918 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2919 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002920
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002921- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2922 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2923 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002924
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002925- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2926 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2927 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2928 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2929 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002930
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002931- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2932 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2933 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002934
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002935- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2936 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002937
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002938- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2939 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2940 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2941 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2942 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002943
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002944- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2945 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2946 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2947
2948- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2949 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2950 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002951
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002952- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2953 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2954 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2955 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002956 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002957
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002958- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2959 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002960
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002961- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2962 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002963
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002964- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002965 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002966 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2967 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002968
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002969
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002970What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002971===============================
2972
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002973*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2974
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002975Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002976--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002977
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002978- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2979 with a custom metaclass.
2980
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002981Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002982-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002983
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002984- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2985 are proxies.
2986
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002987Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002988-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002989
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002990- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2991 very short strings.
2992
2993- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2994 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2995 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2996 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2997 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2998
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002999Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003000-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003001
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003002- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3003 close or delete time).
3004
3005- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3006 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3007
3008- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3009
3010- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003011 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003012
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003013Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003014-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003015
3016Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003017-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003018
3019C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003020-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003021
3022New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003023-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003024
3025Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003026-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003027
3028Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003029-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003030
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003031- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3032
3033- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3034 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3035
3036- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3037 deleted at process exit time.
3038
3039- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3040 in backslash.
3041
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003042Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003043----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003044
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003045- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3046 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3047 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3048
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003049
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003050What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003051===========================
3052
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003053*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3054
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003055Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003056--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003057
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003058- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3059 been extensively updated. See
3060
3061 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3062
3063 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3064
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003065- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3066 deleted!
3067
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003068- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3069 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3070 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3071 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3072 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3073
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003074- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3075
3076 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3077 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3078
3079 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3080 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3081 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3082 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3083 supported anyway.
3084
3085 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3086 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3087
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003088- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3089 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3090 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3091 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3092 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003093
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003094- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3095 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3096 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3097
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003098Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003099-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003100
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003101- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3102 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3103 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3104 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3105 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3106 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003107 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3108 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3109 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3110 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003111
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003112- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3113 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3114 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3115
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003116Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003117-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003118
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003119- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3120
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003121Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003122-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003123
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003124- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3125 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3126 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3127 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3128 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3129 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3130
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003131- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3132
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003133- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3134
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003135- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3136
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003137- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3138 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3139 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3140
3141- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3142
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003143Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003144-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003145
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003146- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3147 off a search on Google.
3148
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003149Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003150-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003151
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003152- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3153 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3154 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3155 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3156 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3157 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3158 other platforms should do likewise.
3159
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003160- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3161 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3162 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3163
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003164C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003165-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003166
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003167- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3168 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3169 producing key-value pairs.
3170
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003171- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003172 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003173 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3174 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3175 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3176 previously went unchallenged.
3177
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003178New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003179-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003180
3181Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003182-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003183
3184Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003185-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003186
3187Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003188----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003189
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003190- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3191 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003192
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003193- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3194 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3195 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3196 home.
3197
3198
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003199What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003200===========================
3201
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003202*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3203
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003204Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003205--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003206
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003207- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3208 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003209
3210 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003211 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003212
3213 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3214 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003215 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003216 This needs to be documented.
3217
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003218- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3219 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3220
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003221- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3222 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3223 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3224
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003225- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3226 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3227
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003228- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3229 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3230 class forbids it).
3231
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003232- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3233 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3234 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3235
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003236- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3237
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003238Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003239-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003240
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003241- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3242 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003243 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003244
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003245- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3246 (like 1 + '').
3247
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003248Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003249-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003250
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003251- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3252 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3253 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3254 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003255 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003256 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3257
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003258- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3259 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3260 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3261 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3262
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003263- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3264 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003265 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3266 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3267 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003268
3269- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3270 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003271
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003272- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3273 bytes on its input.
3274
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003275Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003276-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003277
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003278- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003279 convenience function.
3280
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003281- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3282 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3283 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003284 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3285 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3286 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3287 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3288 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3289 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003290
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003291- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3292 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3293 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3294 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3295
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003296- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3297 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3298 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3299
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003300- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3301 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3302 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3303 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3304
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003305- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3306 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003307 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003308 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3309 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3310 new -l and -e options.
3311
3312- statcache is now deprecated.
3313
3314- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3315 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003316 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003317 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3318 time properly taken into account.
3319
3320- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3321 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3322 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3323 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3324
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003325Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003326-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003327
3328Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003329-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003330
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003331- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3332 is built with libdb3 if available.
3333
3334- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3335
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003336C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003337-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003338
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003339- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3340 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3341 PySequence_Size().
3342
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003343- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3344
3345- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3346 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3347 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3348
3349- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3350 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3351
3352- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3353 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3354
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003355New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003356-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003357
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003358- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3359 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3360
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003361- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3362 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3363
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003364- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3365
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003366Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003367-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003368
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003369- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3370 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3371
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003372Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003373-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003374
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003375Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003376----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003377
3378- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3379 removed completely in the next release.
3380
3381- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3382 OSX.
3383
3384- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3385 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3386
3387- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3388
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003389
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003390What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003391===========================
3392
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003393*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3394
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003395Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003396--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003397
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003398- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003399 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003400 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003401 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3402 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003403 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3404 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003405 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3406 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003407
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003408- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3409 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3410
3411- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3412 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3413
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003414Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003415-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003416
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003417- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3418 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3419 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3420 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3421 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3422 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3423 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3424 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3425
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003426- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3427 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3428 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3429 example).
3430
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003431- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003432 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003433 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003434 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003435
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003436- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3437 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3438 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003439 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003440
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003441- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3442 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3443 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3444 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3445 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3446 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3447
3448 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3449
3450 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3451
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003452Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003453-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003454
3455- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3456
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003457- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3458
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003459- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3460 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003461
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003462- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3463 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3464 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3465 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3466 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3467 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003468 attributes.
3469
3470- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3471 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3472 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003473
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003474- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3475 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3476 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003477
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003478- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3479 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3480 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003481 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3482 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3483
3484- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3485 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003486
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003487Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003488-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003489
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003490- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3491 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3492
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003493- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3494 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3495 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3496 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3497
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003498- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3499 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3500 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3501 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3502
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003503 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3504 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3505 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3506 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3507 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3508 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3509 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3510 without losing information).
3511
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003512- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003513 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3514 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3515 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3516 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3517 module).
3518
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003519 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003520 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3521 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3522 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3523 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003524
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003525- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003526 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3527 encoding.
3528
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003529- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3530 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3531
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003532- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003533 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3534
3535- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3536 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3537 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3538 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3539
3540- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3541
3542- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3543 ON, and OFF.
3544
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003545- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3546 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3547
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003548Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003549-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003550
3551- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3552 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3553 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003554
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003555- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3556 been added: -X and -E.
3557
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003558Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003559-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003560
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003561- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3562 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3563
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003564C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003565-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003566
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003567- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3568 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3569 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3570 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3571 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3572
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003573- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3574 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3575 as long) arguments.
3576
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003577- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3578 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3579 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3580 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3581 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3582 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3583
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003584- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3585 input.
3586
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003587New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003588-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003589
3590Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003591-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003592
3593Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003594-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003595
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003596- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3597 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3598 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3599
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003600- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3601 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3602 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003603 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003604
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003605 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3606 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3607 import signal
3608 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003609
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003610 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003611 while 1:
3612 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003613 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003614 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3615 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3616 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3617 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003618
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003619
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003620What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3621===========================
3622
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003623*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3624
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003625Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003626--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003627
3628- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3629 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3630 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3631
3632- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3633 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3634 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3635 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3636 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3637 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3638 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003639
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003640- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003641 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003642 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3643 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3644 associate a docstring with a property.
3645
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003646- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3647 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3648 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3649 other built-in object types.
3650
3651- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3652 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3653 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3654 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3655 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3656
3657- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3658 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3659
3660- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3661 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003662 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003663 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3664 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3665 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3666 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3667 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3668
3669- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3670 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3671 class.
3672
3673- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3674 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3675 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3676 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3677
3678- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3679 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3680 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3681 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3682
3683- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3684 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3685
3686- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3687 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3688 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3689 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3690 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003691 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003692 with the same value as s.
3693
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003694- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3695
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003696Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003697----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003698
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003699- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3700
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003701- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3702 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3703 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3704 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3705 objects.
3706
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003707- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3708 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003709 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3710 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3711
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003712- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3713 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3714 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3715
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003716Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003717-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003718
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003719- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3720 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3721 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3722 by the instances.
3723
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003724- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3725 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3726 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3727
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003728- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3729 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3730 before the entire comparison is complete.
3731
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003732- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3733 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3734 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3735
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003736- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3737 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3738 getwriter().
3739
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003740- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3741 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3742
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003743- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003744 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3745 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3746
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003747- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3748 iterable object.
3749
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003750- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3751 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003752
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003753- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3754 authentication.
3755
3756- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3757 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003758
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003759- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003760 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3761 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3762 a sample driver.)
3763
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003764Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003765-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003766
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003767- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3768 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3769 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3770 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3771 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3772 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3773 kernel has large file support.
3774
3775- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3776 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3777 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3778 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3779 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3780
3781- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3782 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3783 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3784
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003785C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003786-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003787
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003788- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3789 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3790
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003791New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003792-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003793
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003794- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3795 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3796
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003797Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003798-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003799
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003800- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3801 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3802 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3803 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3804 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3805
3806- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3807 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3808 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3809 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3810
3811- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3812 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3813
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003814Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003815-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003816
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003817- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003818 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3819 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003820
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003821
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003822What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3823===========================
3824
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003825*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3826
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003827Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003828----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003829
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003830- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3831 big to represent as a C double.
3832
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003833- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3834 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3835 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3836 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3837 restriction).
3838
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003839- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3840 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3841 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3842 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3843 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3844
3845 >>> dir([])
3846 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3847 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3848 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3849 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3850 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3851 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3852 'reverse', 'sort']
3853
3854 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3855
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003856- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003857 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3858 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3859 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3860 OverflowError exception.
3861
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003862- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003863 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003864 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3865 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3866 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3867 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3868 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003869 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003870 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3871 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3872
3873 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3874 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3875 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3876 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003877
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003878- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003879 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3880 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3881 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3882 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3883 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3884 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3885 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3886 once it is created.
3887
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003888- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3889 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3890 (key, value) pairs.
3891
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003892- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003893 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3894 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3895
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003896- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3897 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3898 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3899 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3900 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003901
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003902- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003903 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3904 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3905
3906 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3907
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003908- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003909 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3910
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003911Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003912-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003913
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003914- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003915 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3916 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003917
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003918- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3919 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3920 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3921 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3922 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3923 in this area anymore).
3924
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003925- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3926 threading.Timer.
3927
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003928- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3929 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3930
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003931- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003932 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3933
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003934- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003935 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3936 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3937 converted to Python longs.
3938
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003939- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003940 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3941
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003942- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3943 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3944 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3945
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003946Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003947-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003948
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003949- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3950 division operators as per PEP 238.
3951
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003952Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003953-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003954
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003955- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3956 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3957 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3958 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3959
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003960C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003961-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003962
3963- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003964
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003965- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3966 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003967 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003968
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003969 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3970 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003971 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003972 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003973
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003974- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003975 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3976 module:
3977
3978 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003979
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003980 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3981 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003982
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003983 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3984 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003985
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003986 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3987
3988 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3989
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003990- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003991 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3992 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3993 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003994
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003995New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003996-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003997
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003998- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3999 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4000 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4001 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4002 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004003
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004004Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004005-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004006
4007Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004008-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004009
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004010- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4011 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4012 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4013 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004014 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4015 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4016 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4017 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4018 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004019
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004020- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004021 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4022
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004023
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004024What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4025===========================
4026
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004027*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4028
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004029Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004030-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004031
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004032- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4033 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4034
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004035- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4036 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4037 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004038
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004039- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4040 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4041 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4042 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004043
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004044- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4045
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004046- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004047
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004048Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004049-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004050
4051- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004052 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004053 the module docstring for details.
4054
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004055Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004056-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004057
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004058- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004059 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4060 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4061 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004062
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004063- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4064 Nick Mathewson.
4065
4066Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004067----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004068
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004069- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4070 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4071 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4072 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4073 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4074 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4075 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4076 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4077
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004078- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4079 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4080 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4081 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4082
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004083- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4084 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4085 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4086 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4087 come a long way).
4088
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004089- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4090 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4091 write filters for these warnings).
4092
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004093- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4094 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4095 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4096 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4097 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4098
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004099- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4100 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4101 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4102 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4103 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4104 older distribution.
4105
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004106Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004107-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004108
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004109- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4110 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004111 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004112
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004113- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4114 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4115 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4116
4117- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4118
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004119- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4120
4121- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4122
4123- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4124
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004125- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004126
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004127- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4128
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004129New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004130-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004131
4132C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004133-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004134
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004135- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4136 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4137 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4138 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4139 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4140 against buffer overruns.
4141
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004142- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004143 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4144 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004145 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4146 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4147 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4148
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004149- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4150 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4151 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4152 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4153 deprecated.
4154
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004155Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004156-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004157
4158- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4159 relevant is found.
4160
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004161
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004162What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004163===========================
4164
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004165*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4166
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004167Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004168----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004169
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004170- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4171 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4172 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4173 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4174 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4175 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4176 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4177 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004178 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004179 repaired.
4180
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004181- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004182 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004183 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4184 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4185 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4186 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4187 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4188 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4189 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4190 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4191
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004192- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4193 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4194 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4195 leading BMO character).
4196
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004197- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4198 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4199 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4200
4201 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4202 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4203 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004204
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004205 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4206 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4207 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4208 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4209 for various simple to use conversions.
4210
4211 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4212 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4213
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004214 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4215 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4216 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4217 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4218 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4219 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4220 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4221 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4222 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4223 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4224 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4225 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4226 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4227 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4228 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004229
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004230- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4231 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4232 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004233 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004234 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004235
4236 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004237 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4238 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4239 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4240 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4241 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004242 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4243 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004244
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004245 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4246 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4247 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004248 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004249
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004250- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4251 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4252 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4253 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4254 floating arithmetic,
4255
4256 x = 9007199254740992.0
4257 print long(x)
4258
4259 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4260 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4261 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4262 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4263 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4264 functions are of good quality).
4265
4266 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4267 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4268 algorithms to break.
4269
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004270- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4271 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4272 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4273 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4274 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4275 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4276 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4277 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4278 order.
4279
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004280- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4281 operation along the most common code paths.
4282
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004283- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4284 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4285
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004286- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4287 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4288 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4289 {}.update(UserDict())
4290
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004291- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4292 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4293 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4294 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4295 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4296 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4297 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4298 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4299
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004300- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004301 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004302
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004303 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004304 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4305 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004306 join() method of strings
4307 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004308 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4309 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004310 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004311 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004312
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004313- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4314 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4315
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004316- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4317 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4318
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004319- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4320 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4321 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4322 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4323
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004324- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4325 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004326 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004327 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4328 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004329
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004330- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4331
4332
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004333Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004334-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004335
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004336- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004337 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004338 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4339 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4340
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004341- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4342 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4343
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004344- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4345 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4346 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4347 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4348
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004349- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4350 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4351 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4352
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004353- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4354
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004355- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4356
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004357- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4358 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4359 that are still imported into string.py).
4360
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004361- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4362
4363- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4364 Now it does.
4365
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004366- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4367
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004368- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4369 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4370 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4371 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4372 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004373 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4374 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004375
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004376- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4377 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4378 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4379 'help(object)'.
4380
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004381Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004382-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004383
4384- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004385 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004386 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4387 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4388
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004389- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004390 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4391 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004392
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004393C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004394-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004395
4396- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4397 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004398
4399----
4400
4401**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**