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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
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000231- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
232
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000233- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
234
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000235- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
236 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
237
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000238- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
239 fewer false positives.
240
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000241- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
242 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
243
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000244- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
245 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
246
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000247- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
248 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000249 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
250 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
251 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000252
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000253- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
254 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
255 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
256 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
257
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000258- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
259 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
260 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
261 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
262 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
263 #897625.
264
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000265- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
266 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
267
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000268- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
269 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
270 and pops on either side of the deque.
271
272- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
273 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
274
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000275- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
276 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
277 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
278 other functions that expect a function argument.
279
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000280- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
281
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000282- os.getsid was added.
283
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000284- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
285 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
286 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
287
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000288- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
289
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000290- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
291
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000292- readline.clear_history was added.
293
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000294- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
295
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000296- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
297
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000298- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
299
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000300- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
301
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000302- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
303
304- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
305
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000306- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
307
308- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
309
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000310- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
311 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
312 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
313
314- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
315 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
316 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
317 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
318 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
319 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
320 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
321
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000322- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
323 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
324 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
325 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000326
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000327- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
328 iterators from a single iterable.
329
330- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
331 of raising a TypeError exception.
332
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000333- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
334 as parameter.
335
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000336Library
337-------
338
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000339- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
340 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
341
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000342- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
343
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000344- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
345 on cygwin and mingw32.
346
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000347- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
348
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000349- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
350 module.
351
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000352- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
353 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
354 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
355
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000356- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
357 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
358 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
359
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000360- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
361
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000362- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
363
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000364- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
365 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
366
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000367- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
368 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
369 type pattern with the same value exists.
370
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000371- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
372 when run from the command prompt).
373
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000374- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
375 not taken into consideration when caching value.
376
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000377- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
378 default sort).
379
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000380- Added global runctx function to profile module
381
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000382- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
383
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000384- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
385
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000386- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
387
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000388- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
389 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
390 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
391 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
392 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
393 accordingly.
394
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000395- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
396 decoding standards.
397
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000398- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
399 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
400 called for all requests.
401
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000402- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
403 they are passed to the compiler.
404
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000405- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
406 indent, width and depth.
407
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000408- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
409 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
410
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000411- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
412 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
413
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000414- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
415
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000416- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
417
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000418- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
419
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000420- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
421 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
422
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000423- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000424 for better performance.
425
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000426- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000427
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000428- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
429 a string).
430
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000431- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
432
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000433- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
434
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000435- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
436
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000437- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
438
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000439- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
440 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
441 list of fieldnames.
442
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000443- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
444 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
445
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000446- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
447
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000448- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
449 empty lists.
450
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000451- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
452 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
453 and shelves.
454
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000455- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
456 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
457
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000458- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000459 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
460 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000461
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000462- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
463 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000464 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000465
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000466- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000467 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
468 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
469
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000470- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
471 and removed in Py2.4.
472
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000473- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
474
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000475- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
476
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000477Tools/Demos
478-----------
479
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000480- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
481 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
482
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000483- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
484
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000485- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
486 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
487 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
488 destination in situations where both files are given.
489
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000490- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
491 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
492 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
493 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
494
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000495- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
496
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000497- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
498 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
499 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
500 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
501 now.
502
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000503- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
504 in effect
505
506- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
507 C-c C-h
508
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000509- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
510 -d option was given.
511
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000512Build
513-----
514
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000515- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
516 is configured --with-tsc.
517
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000518- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
519 on AMD64.
520
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000521- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
522 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
523
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000524- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
525 removed.
526
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000527- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
528 supported (see PEP 11).
529
530- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
531
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000532- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
533
534- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
535 (see PEP 11).
536
537- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
538 sizeof(char) must be 1.
539
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000540C API
541-----
542
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000543- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
544 generator objects.
545
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000546- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
547 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000548 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
549 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000550
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000551- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
552 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
553
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000554- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
555 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
556 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
557 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
558 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
559
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000560- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
561 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
562 about 10% faster.
563
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000564- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
565 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
566
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000567- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
568 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
569 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
570 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
571
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000572New platforms
573-------------
574
575Tests
576-----
577
578Windows
579-------
580
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000581- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
582 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
583 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
584 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
585
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000586- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
587 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
588 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
589
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000590Mac
591----
592
593
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000594What's New in Python 2.3 final?
595===============================
596
597*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
598
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000599IDLE
600----
601
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000602- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
603 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
604 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
605 context-menu actions.
606
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000607- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
608 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
609 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
610 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
611 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
612 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
613 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
614 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
615 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
616
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000617
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000618What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
619=============================================
620
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000621*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000622
623Core and builtins
624-----------------
625
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000626- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000627 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000628 comment at the end are still unsupported.
629
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000630Extension modules
631-----------------
632
633- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
634 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
635 than once. This has been fixed.
636
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000637- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
638 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
639 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
640 call.
641
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000642- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
643
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000644Library
645-------
646
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000647- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
648 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
649
650- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
651 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
652 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
653 restored.
654
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000655IDLE
656----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000657
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000658- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000659
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000660Build
661-----
662
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000663- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
664 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
665
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000666C API
667-----
668
669Windows
670-------
671
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000672- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
673 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
674
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000675- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
676
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000677Mac
678---
679
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000680- Various fixes to pimp.
681
682- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
683
684- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
685 more problems than it solves.
686
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000687
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000688What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
689=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000690
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000691*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
692
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000693Core and builtins
694-----------------
695
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000696- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
697 by sys.setcheckinterval().
698
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000699- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
700 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000701 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000702
703- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
704 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
705 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000706 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000707
708- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
709 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000710
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000711- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
712 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
713 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
714
715- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000716 770247.
717
718- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000719
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000720Extension modules
721-----------------
722
723- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
724 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
725
726- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
727
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000728- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
729
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000730- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
731 contained within the _strptime module.
732
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000733- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
734 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
735
736- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000737 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
738
739- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
740 the find_class attribute, if present.
741
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000742- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000743
744 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
745 (SF bug 763298).
746
747 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000748 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
749 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
750 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000751
752 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
753
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000754Library
755-------
756
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000757- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
758
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000759- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
760 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
761 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
762 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
763 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
764 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
765 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
766 or Tester().
767
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000768- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
769 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
770 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
771 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
772 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
773 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
774 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
775 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
776 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000777
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000778 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000779
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000780- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
781 weren't before was an oversight.
782
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000783- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
784 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
785
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000786- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
787 when there are no lines.
788
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000789- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
790 which could occur with Tk 8.4
791
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000792- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
793 to child processes.
794
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000795- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
796
797- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
798
799- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
800 xmlrpclib.
801
802- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
803 responses.
804
805- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
806 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
807
808- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
809 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
810 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
811
812- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
813 used as patterns.
814
815- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
816 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
817 than Tk 8.3.
818
819- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
820
821- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000822
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000823Tools/Demos
824-----------
825
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000826- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
827
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000828- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
829
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000830- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000831
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000832Build
833-----
834
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000835- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
836
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000837- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
838
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000839- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
840 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000841
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000842- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
843 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
844 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000845
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000846C API
847-----
848
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000849- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
850 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
851
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000852Windows
853-------
854
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000855- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
856 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
857 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
858 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
859 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
860 Python exception ::
861
862 thread.error: can't start new thread
863
864 is raised now.
865
866- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
867 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
868 instead of from DLL teardown.
869
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000870Mac
871---
872
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000873- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000874 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000875 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
876 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
877 the executable in the bundle.
878
879- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000880
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000881- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
882
883- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
884 on Panther.
885
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000886What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
887================================
888
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000889*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000890
891Core and builtins
892-----------------
893
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000894- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
895 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
896 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
897 with the -i option.
898
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000899- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
900 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
901
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000902- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
903 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
904
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000905- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
906 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
907 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
908 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
909 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
910 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
911 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
912 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
913 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
914 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
915 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
916 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
917 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000918
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000919- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
920 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
921 embedded in a lambda expression.
922
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000923- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
924 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
925 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
926 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
927 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
928
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000929- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
930 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
931 matches the restriction on classic classes.
932
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000933- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
934 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
935
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000936- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
937 It's writable again.
938
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000939- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
940 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
941 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000942 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000943
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000944- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
945 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
946 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
947
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000948Extension modules
949-----------------
950
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000951- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
952 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
953
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000954- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
955 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
956 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
957 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
958
959- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
960 collection.
961
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000962- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
963 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
964 unique within a single program run.
965
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000966- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
967 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
968
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000969- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
970 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
971
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000972- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
973 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000974
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000975- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
976
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000977- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
978 Fixes SF bug #730685.
979
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000980- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
981 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
982 for many BSD-derived systems.
983
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000984
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000985Library
986-------
987
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000988- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
989 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
990 primary ones:
991
992 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
993 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
994 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
995
996 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
997 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
998 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
999 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1000 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1001 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1002
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001003- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1004 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1005 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1006 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1007 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1008 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1009 argument.
1010
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001011- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1012 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1013 in the archive.
1014
1015- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1016 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1017
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001018- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1019 569574).
1020
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001021- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1022 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1023 no more.
1024
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001025- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1026 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1027 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1028 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1029 code coverage.
1030
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001031- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1032 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1033 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001034 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1035 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001036
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001037- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1038 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1039 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001040 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001041
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001042- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1043
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001044- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1045 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1046 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1047 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1048
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001049- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1050 handling.
1051
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001052- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1053 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1054
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001055- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1056 in socket.py.
1057
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001058- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1059
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001060- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1061 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1062 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1063 opener with proxy support.
1064
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001065- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1066
1067- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1068
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001069Tools/Demos
1070-----------
1071
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001072- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1073
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001074- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1075
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001076- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1077 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001078
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001079- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1080 files.
1081
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001082Build
1083-----
1084
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001085- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001086 different root directory.
1087
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001088C API
1089-----
1090
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001091- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1092 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1093 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1094 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1095 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1096 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1097 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1098 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1099 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1100 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1101
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001102- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1103 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1104 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1105 from Python.
1106
1107
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001108New platforms
1109-------------
1110
1111None this time.
1112
1113Tests
1114-----
1115
1116- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1117 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1118
1119Windows
1120-------
1121
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001122- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1123
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001124- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1125 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1126 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1127 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1128 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1129 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1130 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1131 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1132 that's what it's for.
1133
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001134Mac
1135---
1136
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001137- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1138 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1139 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1140 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001141- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1142 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1143- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001144
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001145SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1146------------------------------------
1147
1148430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1149598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1150622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1151661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1152683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1153697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1154713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1155724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1156727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1157729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1158730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1159731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1160732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1161733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1162735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1163740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1164744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1165745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1166747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1167749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1168751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1169753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1170755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1171757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1172760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1173
1174
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001175What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1176================================
1177
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001178*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001179
1180Core and builtins
1181-----------------
1182
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001183- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1184 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1185
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001186- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1187 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1188 and cannot be strings).
1189
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001190- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1191 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1192 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1193 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1194
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001195- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1196 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1197 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1198 Python itself.
1199
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001200- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1201 the referenced object, if it has one.
1202
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001203- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1204 the thread started at
1205 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1206
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001207- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1208 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1209 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1210 placed on a list index.
1211
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001212- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1213 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1214 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1215 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1216
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001217- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1218 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1219 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1220 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1221 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1222 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1223 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1224
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001225- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1226 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1227 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1228 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1229 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1230
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001231- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1232 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001233
1234- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1235 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1236 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1237 #693195.)
1238
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001239- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1240 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001241
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001242- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001243 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001244 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1245 interpreter executions, would fail.
1246
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001247- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001248 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001249 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001250
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001251Extension modules
1252-----------------
1253
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001254- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1255 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1256 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1257 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1258
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001259- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1260 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1261
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001262- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1263 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1264 and Greg Chapman.)
1265
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001266- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1267 recursively.
1268
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001269- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001270 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1271 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1272 leaks.
1273
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001274- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1275
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001276- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1277 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1278 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1279 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1280 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1281 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1282 #705836.
1283
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001284- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001285 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1286
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001287- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1288 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1289 See SF bug #692416.
1290
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001291- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1292 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1293
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001294- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1295 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1296 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001297
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001298- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001299 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1300 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1301
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001302- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1303 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1304 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1305 timeouts to work properly.
1306
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001307Library
1308-------
1309
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001310- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1311 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1312 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1313 future release.
1314
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001315- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1316 for querying platform dependent features.
1317
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001318- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001319
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001320- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1321 pickle protocol versions.
1322
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001323- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1324 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1325 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1326
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001327- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1328
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001329- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1330 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1331 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1332 modules.
1333
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001334- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1335 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1336 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1337
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001338- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1339 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1340
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001341- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1342 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1343 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1344
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001345- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001346 MS Office extensions.
1347
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001348- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1349 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1350
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001351- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1352 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1353
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001354- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1355 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1356 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1357 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1358 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1359 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1360
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001361- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1362 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1363 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001364
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001365- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1366 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1367 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1368
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001369- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1370
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001371- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1372 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1373 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1374
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001375Tools/Demos
1376-----------
1377
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001378- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1379 See the module docstring for details.
1380
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001381Build
1382-----
1383
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001384- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1385 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001386
1387C API
1388-----
1389
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001390- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1391
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001392- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1393 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1394 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1395
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001396- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1397 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001398
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001399 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1400 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1401 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001402
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001403- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001404 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1405
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001406- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1407 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1408 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001409
1410New platforms
1411-------------
1412
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001413None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001414
1415Tests
1416-----
1417
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001418- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1419 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001420
1421Windows
1422-------
1423
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001424- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1425 function.
1426
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001427- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1428 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001429
1430Mac
1431---
1432
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001433- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1434 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001435
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001436- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1437 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001438
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001439- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1440 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1441 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001442
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001443- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001444 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1445 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001446
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001447- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1448 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001449
1450
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001451What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1452=================================
1453
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001454*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001455
1456Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001457-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001458
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001459- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1460 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1461 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1462
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001463- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1464 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1465 (SF patch #664376.)
1466
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001467- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1468 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1469 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1470 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1471 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1472 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001473 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001474
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001475- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1476 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1477 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1478 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001479 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001480
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001481- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1482 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1483 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1484 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1485 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1486 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1487 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1488 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1489 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1490 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1491 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1492
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001493- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1494 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1495 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1496 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1497 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1498 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1499
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001500- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1501 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1502
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001503- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1504 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1505 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1506 case.)
1507
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001508- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1509 passed as unicode strings.
1510
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001511- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1512 See SF bug #683467.
1513
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001514- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1515 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1516
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001517- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1518
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001519- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1520
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001521- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1522 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1523 arguments.
1524
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001525- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1526 See SF bug #667147.
1527
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001528- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001529 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001530 See SF bug #676155.
1531
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001532- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001533 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001534 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1535 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1536 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1537 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1538 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1539 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001540
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001541Extension modules
1542-----------------
1543
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001544- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1545 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1546 tp_as_number pointer.
1547
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001548- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1549 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1550 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1551 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1552 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1553
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001554- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1555
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001556- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1557
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001558- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001559 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001560 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1561 patch #678531.)
1562
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001563- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1564 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1565
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001566- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1567 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1568
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001569- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1570
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001571- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1572 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1573 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1574
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001575- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1576
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001577- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1578 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1579
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001580- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001581
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001582- datetime changes:
1583
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001584 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1585
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001586 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1587 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1588 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1589 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1590 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1591 now.
1592
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001593 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001594 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1595 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001596
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001597 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001598 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001599 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1600 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1601 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1602 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001603
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001604 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1605 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1606 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001607 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1608
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001609 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1610 by a later example coded by Guido.
1611
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001612 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001613 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1614 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1615 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001616 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1617 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1618
1619 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1620 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1621 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1622 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1623 tzinfo subclass instance.
1624
1625 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1626 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1627 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1628 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1629 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1630 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1631 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1632 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001633
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001634 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1635 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1636 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1637 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1638 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001639 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1640
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001641 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001642
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001643 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1644 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1645 as a naive datetime object.
1646
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001647 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1648 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1649 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1650
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001651 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1652 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1653 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1654 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1655 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1656 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1657 comparison.
1658
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001659 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1660 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1661 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1662 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001663 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001664
1665 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001666
1667 and ::
1668
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001669 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1670
1671 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1672 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1673 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1674 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1675
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001676 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1677 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1678 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1679 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1680 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1681
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001682 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1683 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001684 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1685 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001686
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001687Library
1688-------
1689
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001690- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1691 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1692
1693- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1694 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1695 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1696 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1697 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1698 See PEP 307 for details.
1699
1700- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1701 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1702
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001703- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1704 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001705 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001706 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1707 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001708 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001709
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001710- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1711 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1712
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001713- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1714 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1715 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1716
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001717- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1718
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001719- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1720 exception.
1721
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001722- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1723 class.
1724
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001725- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1726 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1727 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1728
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001729- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1730 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1731
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001732- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001733 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1734 See SF bug #659228.
1735
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001736- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1737 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1738 See SF patch #651082.
1739
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001740- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001741
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001742- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1743 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1744
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001745- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001746 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001747
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001748- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1749 DOS paths from other platforms.
1750
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001751Tools/Demos
1752-----------
1753
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001754- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1755 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1756 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1757 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1758 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1759 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1760 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1761 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1762 example:
1763
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001764 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1765 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001766
1767 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1768
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001769
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001770Build
1771-----
1772
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001773- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1774 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1775 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001776 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1777
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001778 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1779
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001780- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1781 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1782 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1783 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1784 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1785 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1786 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1787 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1788 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1789
1790- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1791 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1792 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1793 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1794
1795- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1796 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1797
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001798C API
1799-----
1800
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001801- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1802 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001803
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001804- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1805 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1806 tp_as_number pointer.
1807
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001808- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1809 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1810 (SF #681367)
1811
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001812- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1813 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1814 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1815 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001816
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001817Tests
1818-----
1819
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001820- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001821 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1822 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1823 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1824 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1825 pydoc.)
1826
1827- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1828
1829- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001830
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001831Windows
1832-------
1833
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001834- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1835 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1836 time).
1837
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001838- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1839 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1840
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001841- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1842 release without strong cryptography.
1843
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001844- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001845 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001846
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001847- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1848 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1849
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001850Mac
1851---
1852
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001853- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1854 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001855
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001856- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1857 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1858 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001859
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001860- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1861 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001862
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001863- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1864 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1865 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1866 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001867
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001868- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001869 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1870 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1871 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001872
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001873
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001874What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001875=================================
1876
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001877*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001878
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001879Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001880--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001881
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001882- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1883
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001884- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1885 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001886 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001887 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001888 a different meaning than before.
1889
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001890- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001891 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001892 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001893
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001894- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001895 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001896 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001897
1898- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1899 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1900 and deallocation.
1901
1902- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1903 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1904
1905- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1906 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1907 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1908 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1909 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1910
1911- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1912 now detected by the garbage collector.
1913
1914- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1915 [SF bug 519621]
1916
1917- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1918 identifier.
1919
1920- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1921 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1922 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1923 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1924 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1925 [SF bug 563060]
1926
1927- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1928 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1929 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1930 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1931 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1932
1933- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1934 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1935 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1936
1937- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1938
1939- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1940 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1941 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1942 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1943 state of the slots would be lost.)
1944
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001945Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001946-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001947
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001948- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001949 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1950 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1951 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1952 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001953 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1954 Jython 2.1.
1955
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001956- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001957 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001958 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1959 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1960 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1961 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1962 these, see PEP 302.
1963
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001964- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1965 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1966 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1967
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001968- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1969 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1970 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1971
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001972- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1973 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1974 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1975
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001976- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1977 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1978 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1979 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1980 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1981 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1982 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1983 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1984 releases or implementations.
1985
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001986- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001987 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1988 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001989
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001990- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1991 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1992
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001993- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1994 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1995 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1996
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001997- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1998 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1999
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002000- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2001 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002002 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2003 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002004
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002005- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2006 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2007 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2008 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2009 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2010
2011 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2012 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2013 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2014 pattern.
2015
2016 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2017 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2018 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2019 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2020
2021 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2022 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2023 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2024 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2025 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2026 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2027
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002028- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2029 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2030 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2031 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2032 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2033 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2034 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2035 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002036
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002037- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2038 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2039 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2040 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2041 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002042 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2043 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2044 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2045 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2046 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2047 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2048 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002049
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002050- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2051 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2052
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002053- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2054 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2055 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2056 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2057 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2058 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2059 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2060 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2061 to Zack Weinberg!
2062
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002063- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2064 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2065 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2066 type. This has been fixed now.
2067
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002068- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2069 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2070 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2071
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002072- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2073 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2074 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2075 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2076 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2077 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2078 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2079 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002080 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002081
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002082- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2083 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2084 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002085
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002086- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2087 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2088 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2089 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2090 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2091 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2092 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2093 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002094 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002095 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2096 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2097
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002098- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2099 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2100 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2101 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2102 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2103 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2104 this.)
2105
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002106- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2107 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002108 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002109 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002110 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2111 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002112 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2113 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002114
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002115- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2116 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2117 currently running.
2118
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002119- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2120 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2121 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2122 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2123
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002124- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2125 as directory names.
2126
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002127- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2128 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2129
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002130- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2131 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2132
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002133- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002134 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2135 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002136
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002137- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2138 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2139 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2140 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2141 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2142
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002143- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2144 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2145 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2146 removed.
2147
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002148- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2149 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2150 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2151
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002152- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2153 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2154 to __debug__.
2155
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002156- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2157 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2158 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2159
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002160- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2161 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2162 deprecated now.
2163
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002164- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2165 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2166 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002167
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002168- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2169 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2170 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2171 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2172 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002173
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002174- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2175 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2176
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002177- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2178 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2179 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002180 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002181 is backward compatible.
2182
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002183- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2184 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2185 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2186 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2187 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2188
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002189- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2190 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2191 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2192 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2193 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2194 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002195
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002196- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2197 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2198
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002199- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2200 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2201
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002202- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2203 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2204 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2205 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2206 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2207
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002208- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2209 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2210 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2211
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002212- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002213 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2214
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002215- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2216 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2217 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002218
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002219- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2220 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2221
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002222- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2223 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2224 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2225
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002226- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2227
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002228Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002229-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002230
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002231- Added three operators to the operator module:
2232 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2233 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2234 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2235
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002236- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2237
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002238- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2239 archives.
2240
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002241- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2242 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2243 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2244
2245 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2246
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002247- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2248 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2249 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002250 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002251
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002252- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2253 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2254 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2255 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002256 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2257 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2258 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2259 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002260
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002261- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2262 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002263
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002264- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2265
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002266- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2267 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2268
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002269- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2270 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2271 supported.
2272
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002273- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2274
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002275- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2276 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002277
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002278- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2279 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2280
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002281- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2282
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002283- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2284 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2285
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002286- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2287 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2288 functions but callable type objects.
2289
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002290- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002291 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002292 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002293
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002294- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2295 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002296
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002297- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2298 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002299
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002300- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2301 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2302 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2303 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2304
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002305- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2306 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002307
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002308- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2309 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2310 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2311 and __imul__.
2312
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002313- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002314 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2315 is called.
2316
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002317- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2318 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2319 interpreter was compiled.
2320
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002321- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2322 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2323 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002324 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002325 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2326 1, not 2.
2327
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002328- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2329 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2330 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2331 limit.
2332
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002333- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2334 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2335 bug #623464.
2336
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002337- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2338 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2339 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2340 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2341
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002342Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002343-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002344
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002345- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2346
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002347- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2348 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2349 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2350 with Python 2.3a2.
2351
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002352- os.path exposes getctime.
2353
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002354- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002355 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002356 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002357 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002358 unit tests of floating point results.
2359
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002360- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2361 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2362 has been increased.
2363
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002364- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2365 executed.
2366
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002367- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2368 postinstallation script.
2369
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002370- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2371 test the current module.
2372
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002373- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002374 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2375 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2376 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2377 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2378
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002379- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002380 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002381 Ward's Optik package.
2382
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002383- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2384 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2385 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2386 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2387
2388- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2389 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002390 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002391
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002392- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2393 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2394 shelf are binary pickles.
2395
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002396- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2397 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2398
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002399- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2400 modules are iterators now.
2401
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002402- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2403 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2404 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2405 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2406 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2407 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002408
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002409- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2410 with their entity value.
2411
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002412- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2413
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002414- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2415 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002416
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002417- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2418 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002419 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002420
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002421- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2422 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2423 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2424 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2425 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2426 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2427 main():
2428
2429 import locale
2430 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2431
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002432- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2433 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2434
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002435- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2436 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2437 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2438 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2439 to the new standard.
2440
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002441- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2442 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2443 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2444 an extension to the database.
2445
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002446- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2447 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2448 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2449 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002450 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002451
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002452- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002453 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002454
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002455- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2456 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2457 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2458 bounded integers.
2459
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002460- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2461 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2462 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2463 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2464 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2465 in existence.
2466
2467 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2468 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2469 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2470 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2471 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2472 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2473
2474 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2475 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2476 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2477 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2478
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002479- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2480 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2481 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2482
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002483- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2484
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002485- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2486 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2487 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2488 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2489
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002490- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2491 argument.
2492
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002493- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2494 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2495 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2496 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2497 [SF patch 560794].
2498
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002499- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2500 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2501 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002502 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2503 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2504 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002505
2506- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2507 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002508
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002509- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2510 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2511 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2512 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002513
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002514- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2515 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2516 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2517 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2518 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2519
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002520- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002521
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002522- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2523
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002524- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2525 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2526 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2527 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2528 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2529 identical to None.
2530
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002531- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2532 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2533 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2534 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2535 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2536 results now.
2537
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002538- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2539 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2540
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002541- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2542 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2543 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2544 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2545 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2546 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2547 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2548 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2549
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002550- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2551
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002552- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2553 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2554
2555- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2556 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2557 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2558 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2559 and other systems.
2560
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002561- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2562 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2563 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2564 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 +00002565 work well with these.
2566
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002567- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2568
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002569- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002570 connections.
2571
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002572- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2573 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2574 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2575
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002576- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2577 sets
2578
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002579- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2580 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2581 name.
2582
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002583- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2584 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2585 passed in.
2586
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002587- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002588 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002589 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2590 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002591
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002592- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2593
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002594- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2595
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002596- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2597 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2598 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2599
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002600- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2601 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2602 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2603 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002604 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002605
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002606- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002607 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002608 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002609
2610- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2611 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2612 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2613
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002614- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002615 the value of its expression argument.
2616
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002617- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2618 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2619 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2620
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002621- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2622 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2623 skipstone browser was included.
2624
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002625- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2626 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2627
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002628Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002629-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002630
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002631- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2632 names in addition to accepting file names.
2633
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002634- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2635 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2636 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2637 still used and useful.)
2638
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002639- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2640 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2641 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2642 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002643
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002644- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2645 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2646 the generated binary.
2647
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002648Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002649-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002650
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002651- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2652
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002653- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2654 except in the hands of experts.
2655
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002656- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002657 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2658 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2659 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002660
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002661- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2662 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2663 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2664 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2665 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2666 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2667 builds.
2668
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002669- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2670 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2671 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2672 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2673 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2674 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2675 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2676 new type.
2677
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002678- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002679
2680 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2681 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2682 positive infinities.
2683
2684 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2685 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2686 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2687 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2688 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2689 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2690 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2691
2692 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2693
2694 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2695
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002696- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2697 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2698 size of the executable.
2699
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002700- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2701 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2702 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2703 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002704
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002705- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2706
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002707- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2708 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2709 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002710
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002711- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2712 well as Unix.
2713
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002714- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2715 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2716 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2717 modules in the README file for details.
2718
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002719C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002720-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002721
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002722- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2723 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002724 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002725 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002726 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002727
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002728- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2729 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2730 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2731 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2732 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2733 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002734 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002735 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2736 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2737 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2738 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2739 aligned.)
2740
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002741- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2742 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2743 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2744
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002745- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2746 level.
2747
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002748- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2749 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2750 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2751 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2752 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2753
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002754- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2755 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2756 code.
2757
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002758- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2759 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2760 adjusting for negative indices.
2761
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002762- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2763 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2764 object.
2765
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002766- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2767 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2768 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2769
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002770- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2771 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002772
2773- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2774
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002775- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2776 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2777 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2778 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2779
2780- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2781
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002782- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002783
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002784- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002785 without going through the buffer API.
2786
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002787- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002788
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002789- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2790 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2791 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2792 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2793
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002794- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2795 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2796
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002797- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002798 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2799
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002800New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002801-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002802
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002803- OpenVMS is now supported.
2804
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002805- AtheOS is now supported.
2806
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002807- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2808
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002809- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2810
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002811Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002812-----
2813
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002814- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2815 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2816 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002817
2818Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002819-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002820
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002821- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2822 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2823 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2824 bugs.
2825 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002826 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002827 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2828 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002829 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002830
2831- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002832 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002833
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002834- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2835 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2836
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002837- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2838 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002839 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002840 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2841
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002842- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2843 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2844 use files" uninstall option).
2845
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002846- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2847
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002848- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2849 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2850
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002851- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2852 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2853 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2854
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002855- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2856 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2857 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2858 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2859 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002860 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2861 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2862 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002863
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002864- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002865 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002866 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2867 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2868 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2869 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2870 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2871 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2872 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2873 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2874 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2875 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2876 work around.
2877
2878- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2879 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2880 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2881 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2882 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2883 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2884 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2885 specified with O_CREAT too).
2886
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002887Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002888----
2889
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002890- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002891
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002892- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2893 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2894 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2895
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002896- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2897 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2898 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2899
2900- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2901 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2902 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2903 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2904 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2905 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2906 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2907 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002908
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002909- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2910 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2911 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002912
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002913- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2914 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2915 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2916 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2917 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002918
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002919- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2920 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2921 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002922
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002923- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2924 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002925
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002926- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2927 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2928 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2929 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2930 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002931
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002932- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2933 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2934 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2935
2936- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2937 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2938 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002939
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002940- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2941 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2942 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2943 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002944 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002945
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002946- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2947 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002948
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002949- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2950 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002951
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002952- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002953 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002954 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2955 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002956
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002957
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002958What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002959===============================
2960
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002961*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2962
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002963Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002964--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002965
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002966- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2967 with a custom metaclass.
2968
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002969Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002970-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002971
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002972- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2973 are proxies.
2974
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002975Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002976-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002977
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002978- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2979 very short strings.
2980
2981- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2982 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2983 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2984 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2985 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2986
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002987Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002988-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002989
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002990- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2991 close or delete time).
2992
2993- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2994 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2995
2996- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2997
2998- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002999 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003000
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003001Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003002-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003003
3004Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003005-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003006
3007C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003008-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003009
3010New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003011-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003012
3013Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003014-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003015
3016Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003017-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003018
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003019- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3020
3021- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3022 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3023
3024- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3025 deleted at process exit time.
3026
3027- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3028 in backslash.
3029
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003030Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003031----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003032
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003033- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3034 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3035 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3036
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003037
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003038What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003039===========================
3040
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003041*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3042
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003043Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003044--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003045
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003046- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3047 been extensively updated. See
3048
3049 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3050
3051 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3052
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003053- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3054 deleted!
3055
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003056- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3057 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3058 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3059 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3060 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3061
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003062- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3063
3064 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3065 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3066
3067 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3068 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3069 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3070 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3071 supported anyway.
3072
3073 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3074 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3075
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003076- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3077 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3078 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3079 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3080 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003081
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003082- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3083 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3084 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3085
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003086Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003087-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003088
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003089- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3090 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3091 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3092 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3093 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3094 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003095 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3096 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3097 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3098 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003099
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003100- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3101 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3102 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3103
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003104Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003105-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003106
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003107- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3108
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003109Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003110-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003111
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003112- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3113 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3114 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3115 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3116 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3117 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3118
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003119- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3120
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003121- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3122
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003123- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3124
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003125- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3126 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3127 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3128
3129- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3130
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003131Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003132-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003133
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003134- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3135 off a search on Google.
3136
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003137Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003138-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003139
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003140- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3141 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3142 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3143 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3144 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3145 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3146 other platforms should do likewise.
3147
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003148- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3149 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3150 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3151
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003152C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003153-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003154
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003155- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3156 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3157 producing key-value pairs.
3158
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003159- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003160 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003161 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3162 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3163 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3164 previously went unchallenged.
3165
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003166New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003167-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003168
3169Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003170-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003171
3172Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003173-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003174
3175Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003176----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003177
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003178- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3179 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003180
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003181- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3182 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3183 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3184 home.
3185
3186
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003187What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003188===========================
3189
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003190*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3191
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003192Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003193--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003194
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003195- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3196 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003197
3198 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003199 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003200
3201 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3202 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003203 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003204 This needs to be documented.
3205
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003206- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3207 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3208
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003209- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3210 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3211 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3212
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003213- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3214 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3215
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003216- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3217 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3218 class forbids it).
3219
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003220- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3221 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3222 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3223
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003224- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3225
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003226Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003227-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003228
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003229- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3230 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003231 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003232
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003233- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3234 (like 1 + '').
3235
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003236Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003237-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003238
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003239- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3240 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3241 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3242 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003243 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003244 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3245
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003246- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3247 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3248 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3249 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3250
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003251- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3252 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003253 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3254 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3255 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003256
3257- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3258 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003259
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003260- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3261 bytes on its input.
3262
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003263Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003264-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003265
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003266- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003267 convenience function.
3268
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003269- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3270 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3271 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003272 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3273 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3274 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3275 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3276 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3277 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003278
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003279- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3280 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3281 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3282 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3283
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003284- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3285 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3286 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3287
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003288- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3289 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3290 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3291 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3292
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003293- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3294 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003295 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003296 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3297 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3298 new -l and -e options.
3299
3300- statcache is now deprecated.
3301
3302- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3303 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003304 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003305 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3306 time properly taken into account.
3307
3308- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3309 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3310 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3311 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3312
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003313Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003314-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003315
3316Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003317-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003318
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003319- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3320 is built with libdb3 if available.
3321
3322- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3323
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003324C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003325-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003326
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003327- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3328 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3329 PySequence_Size().
3330
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003331- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3332
3333- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3334 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3335 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3336
3337- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3338 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3339
3340- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3341 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3342
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003343New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003344-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003345
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003346- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3347 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3348
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003349- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3350 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3351
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003352- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3353
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003354Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003355-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003356
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003357- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3358 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3359
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003360Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003361-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003362
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003363Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003364----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003365
3366- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3367 removed completely in the next release.
3368
3369- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3370 OSX.
3371
3372- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3373 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3374
3375- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3376
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003377
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003378What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003379===========================
3380
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003381*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3382
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003383Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003384--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003385
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003386- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003387 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003388 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003389 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3390 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003391 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3392 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003393 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3394 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003395
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003396- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3397 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3398
3399- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3400 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3401
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003402Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003403-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003404
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003405- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3406 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3407 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3408 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3409 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3410 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3411 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3412 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3413
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003414- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3415 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3416 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3417 example).
3418
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003419- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003420 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003421 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003422 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003423
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003424- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3425 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3426 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003427 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003428
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003429- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3430 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3431 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3432 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3433 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3434 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3435
3436 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3437
3438 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3439
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003440Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003441-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003442
3443- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3444
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003445- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3446
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003447- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3448 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003449
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003450- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3451 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3452 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3453 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3454 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3455 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003456 attributes.
3457
3458- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3459 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3460 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003461
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003462- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3463 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3464 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003465
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003466- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3467 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3468 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003469 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3470 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3471
3472- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3473 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003474
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003475Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003476-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003477
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003478- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3479 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3480
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003481- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3482 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3483 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3484 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3485
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003486- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3487 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3488 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3489 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3490
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003491 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3492 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3493 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3494 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3495 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3496 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3497 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3498 without losing information).
3499
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003500- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003501 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3502 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3503 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3504 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3505 module).
3506
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003507 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003508 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3509 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3510 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3511 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003512
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003513- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003514 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3515 encoding.
3516
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003517- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3518 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3519
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003520- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003521 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3522
3523- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3524 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3525 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3526 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3527
3528- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3529
3530- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3531 ON, and OFF.
3532
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003533- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3534 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3535
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003536Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003537-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003538
3539- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3540 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3541 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003542
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003543- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3544 been added: -X and -E.
3545
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003546Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003547-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003548
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003549- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3550 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3551
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003552C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003553-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003554
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003555- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3556 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3557 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3558 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3559 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3560
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003561- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3562 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3563 as long) arguments.
3564
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003565- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3566 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3567 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3568 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3569 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3570 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3571
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003572- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3573 input.
3574
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003575New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003576-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003577
3578Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003579-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003580
3581Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003582-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003583
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003584- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3585 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3586 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3587
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003588- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3589 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3590 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003591 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003592
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003593 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3594 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3595 import signal
3596 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003597
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003598 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003599 while 1:
3600 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003601 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003602 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3603 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3604 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3605 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003606
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003607
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003608What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3609===========================
3610
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003611*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3612
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003613Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003614--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003615
3616- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3617 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3618 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3619
3620- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3621 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3622 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3623 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3624 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3625 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3626 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003627
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003628- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003629 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003630 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3631 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3632 associate a docstring with a property.
3633
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003634- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3635 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3636 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3637 other built-in object types.
3638
3639- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3640 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3641 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3642 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3643 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3644
3645- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3646 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3647
3648- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3649 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003650 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003651 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3652 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3653 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3654 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3655 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3656
3657- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3658 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3659 class.
3660
3661- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3662 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3663 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3664 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3665
3666- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3667 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3668 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3669 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3670
3671- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3672 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3673
3674- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3675 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3676 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3677 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3678 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003679 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003680 with the same value as s.
3681
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003682- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3683
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003684Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003685----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003686
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003687- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3688
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003689- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3690 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3691 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3692 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3693 objects.
3694
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003695- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3696 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003697 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3698 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3699
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003700- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3701 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3702 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3703
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003704Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003705-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003706
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003707- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3708 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3709 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3710 by the instances.
3711
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003712- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3713 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3714 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3715
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003716- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3717 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3718 before the entire comparison is complete.
3719
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003720- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3721 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3722 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3723
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003724- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3725 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3726 getwriter().
3727
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003728- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3729 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3730
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003731- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003732 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3733 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3734
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003735- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3736 iterable object.
3737
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003738- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3739 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003740
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003741- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3742 authentication.
3743
3744- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3745 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003746
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003747- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003748 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3749 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3750 a sample driver.)
3751
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003752Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003753-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003754
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003755- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3756 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3757 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3758 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3759 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3760 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3761 kernel has large file support.
3762
3763- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3764 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3765 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3766 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3767 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3768
3769- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3770 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3771 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3772
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003773C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003774-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003775
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003776- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3777 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3778
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003779New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003780-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003781
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003782- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3783 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3784
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003785Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003786-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003787
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003788- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3789 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3790 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3791 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3792 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3793
3794- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3795 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3796 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3797 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3798
3799- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3800 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3801
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003802Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003803-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003804
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003805- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003806 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3807 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003808
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003809
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003810What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3811===========================
3812
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003813*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3814
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003815Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003816----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003817
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003818- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3819 big to represent as a C double.
3820
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003821- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3822 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3823 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3824 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3825 restriction).
3826
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003827- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3828 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3829 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3830 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3831 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3832
3833 >>> dir([])
3834 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3835 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3836 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3837 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3838 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3839 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3840 'reverse', 'sort']
3841
3842 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3843
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003844- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003845 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3846 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3847 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3848 OverflowError exception.
3849
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003850- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003851 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003852 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3853 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3854 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3855 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3856 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003857 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003858 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3859 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3860
3861 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3862 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3863 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3864 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003865
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003866- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003867 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3868 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3869 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3870 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3871 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3872 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3873 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3874 once it is created.
3875
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003876- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3877 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3878 (key, value) pairs.
3879
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003880- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003881 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3882 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3883
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003884- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3885 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3886 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3887 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3888 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003889
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003890- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003891 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3892 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3893
3894 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3895
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003896- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003897 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3898
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003899Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003900-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003901
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003902- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003903 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3904 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003905
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003906- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3907 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3908 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3909 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3910 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3911 in this area anymore).
3912
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003913- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3914 threading.Timer.
3915
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003916- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3917 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3918
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003919- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003920 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3921
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003922- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003923 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3924 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3925 converted to Python longs.
3926
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003927- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003928 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3929
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003930- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3931 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3932 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3933
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003934Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003935-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003936
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003937- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3938 division operators as per PEP 238.
3939
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003940Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003941-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003942
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003943- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3944 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3945 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3946 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3947
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003948C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003949-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003950
3951- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003952
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003953- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3954 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003955 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003956
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003957 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3958 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003959 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003960 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003961
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003962- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003963 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3964 module:
3965
3966 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003967
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003968 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3969 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003970
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003971 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3972 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003973
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003974 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3975
3976 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3977
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003978- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003979 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3980 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3981 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003982
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003983New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003984-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003985
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003986- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3987 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3988 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3989 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3990 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003991
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003992Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003993-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003994
3995Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003996-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003997
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003998- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3999 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4000 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4001 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004002 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4003 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4004 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4005 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4006 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004007
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004008- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004009 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4010
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004011
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004012What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4013===========================
4014
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004015*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4016
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004017Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004018-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004019
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004020- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4021 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4022
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004023- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4024 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4025 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004026
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004027- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4028 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4029 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4030 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004031
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004032- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4033
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004034- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004035
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004036Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004037-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004038
4039- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004040 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004041 the module docstring for details.
4042
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004043Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004044-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004045
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004046- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004047 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4048 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4049 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004050
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004051- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4052 Nick Mathewson.
4053
4054Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004055----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004056
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004057- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4058 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4059 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4060 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4061 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4062 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4063 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4064 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4065
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004066- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4067 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4068 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4069 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4070
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004071- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4072 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4073 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4074 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4075 come a long way).
4076
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004077- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4078 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4079 write filters for these warnings).
4080
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004081- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4082 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4083 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4084 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4085 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4086
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004087- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4088 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4089 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4090 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4091 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4092 older distribution.
4093
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004094Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004095-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004096
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004097- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4098 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004099 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004100
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004101- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4102 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4103 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4104
4105- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4106
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004107- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4108
4109- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4110
4111- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4112
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004113- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004114
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004115- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4116
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004117New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004118-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004119
4120C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004121-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004122
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004123- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4124 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4125 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4126 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4127 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4128 against buffer overruns.
4129
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004130- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004131 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4132 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004133 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4134 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4135 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4136
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004137- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4138 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4139 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4140 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4141 deprecated.
4142
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004143Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004144-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004145
4146- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4147 relevant is found.
4148
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004149
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004150What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004151===========================
4152
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004153*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4154
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004155Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004156----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004157
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004158- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4159 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4160 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4161 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4162 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4163 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4164 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4165 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004166 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004167 repaired.
4168
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004169- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004170 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004171 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4172 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4173 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4174 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4175 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4176 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4177 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4178 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4179
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004180- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4181 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4182 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4183 leading BMO character).
4184
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004185- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4186 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4187 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4188
4189 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4190 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4191 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004192
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004193 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4194 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4195 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4196 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4197 for various simple to use conversions.
4198
4199 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4200 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4201
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004202 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4203 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4204 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4205 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4206 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4207 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4208 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4209 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4210 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4211 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4212 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4213 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4214 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4215 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4216 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004217
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004218- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4219 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4220 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004221 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004222 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004223
4224 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004225 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4226 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4227 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4228 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4229 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004230 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4231 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004232
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004233 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4234 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4235 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004236 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004237
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004238- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4239 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4240 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4241 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4242 floating arithmetic,
4243
4244 x = 9007199254740992.0
4245 print long(x)
4246
4247 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4248 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4249 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4250 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4251 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4252 functions are of good quality).
4253
4254 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4255 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4256 algorithms to break.
4257
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004258- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4259 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4260 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4261 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4262 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4263 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4264 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4265 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4266 order.
4267
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004268- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4269 operation along the most common code paths.
4270
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004271- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4272 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4273
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004274- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4275 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4276 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4277 {}.update(UserDict())
4278
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004279- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4280 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4281 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4282 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4283 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4284 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4285 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4286 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4287
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004288- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004289 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004290
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004291 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004292 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4293 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004294 join() method of strings
4295 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004296 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4297 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004298 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004299 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004300
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004301- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4302 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4303
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004304- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4305 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4306
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004307- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4308 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4309 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4310 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4311
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004312- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4313 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004314 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004315 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4316 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004317
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004318- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4319
4320
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004321Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004322-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004323
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004324- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004325 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004326 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4327 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4328
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004329- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4330 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4331
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004332- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4333 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4334 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4335 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4336
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004337- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4338 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4339 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4340
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004341- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4342
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004343- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4344
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004345- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4346 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4347 that are still imported into string.py).
4348
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004349- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4350
4351- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4352 Now it does.
4353
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004354- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4355
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004356- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4357 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4358 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4359 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4360 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004361 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4362 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004363
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004364- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4365 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4366 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4367 'help(object)'.
4368
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004369Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004370-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004371
4372- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004373 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004374 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4375 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4376
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004377- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004378 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4379 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004380
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004381C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004382-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004383
4384- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4385 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004386
4387----
4388
4389**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**