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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
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000339- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
340 API matches math.log().
341
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000342- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
343 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
344
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000345- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
346
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000347- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
348 on cygwin and mingw32.
349
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000350- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
351
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000352- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
353 module.
354
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000355- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
356 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
357 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
358
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000359- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
360 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
361 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
362
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000363- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
364
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000365- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
366
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000367- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
368 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
369
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000370- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
371 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
372 type pattern with the same value exists.
373
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000374- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
375 when run from the command prompt).
376
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000377- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
378 not taken into consideration when caching value.
379
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000380- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
381 default sort).
382
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000383- Added global runctx function to profile module
384
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000385- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
386
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000387- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
388
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000389- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
390
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000391- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
392 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
393 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
394 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
395 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
396 accordingly.
397
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000398- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
399 decoding standards.
400
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000401- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
402 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
403 called for all requests.
404
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000405- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
406 they are passed to the compiler.
407
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000408- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
409 indent, width and depth.
410
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000411- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
412 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
413
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000414- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
415 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
416
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000417- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
418
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000419- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
420
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000421- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
422
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000423- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
424 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
425
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000426- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000427 for better performance.
428
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000429- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000430
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000431- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
432 a string).
433
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000434- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
435
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000436- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
437
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000438- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
439
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000440- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
441
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000442- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
443 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
444 list of fieldnames.
445
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000446- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
447 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
448
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000449- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
450
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000451- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
452 empty lists.
453
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000454- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
455 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
456 and shelves.
457
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000458- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
459 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
460
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000461- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000462 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
463 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000464
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000465- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
466 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000467 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000468
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000469- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000470 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
471 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
472
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000473- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
474 and removed in Py2.4.
475
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000476- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
477
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000478- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
479
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000480Tools/Demos
481-----------
482
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000483- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
484 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
485
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000486- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
487
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000488- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
489 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
490 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
491 destination in situations where both files are given.
492
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000493- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
494 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
495 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
496 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
497
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000498- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
499
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000500- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
501 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
502 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
503 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
504 now.
505
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000506- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
507 in effect
508
509- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
510 C-c C-h
511
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000512- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
513 -d option was given.
514
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000515Build
516-----
517
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000518- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
519 is configured --with-tsc.
520
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000521- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
522 on AMD64.
523
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000524- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
525 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
526
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000527- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
528 removed.
529
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000530- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
531 supported (see PEP 11).
532
533- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
534
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000535- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
536
537- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
538 (see PEP 11).
539
540- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
541 sizeof(char) must be 1.
542
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000543C API
544-----
545
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000546- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
547 generator objects.
548
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000549- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
550 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000551 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
552 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000553
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000554- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
555 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
556
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000557- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
558 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
559 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
560 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
561 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
562
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000563- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
564 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
565 about 10% faster.
566
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000567- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
568 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
569
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000570- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
571 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
572 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
573 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
574
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000575New platforms
576-------------
577
578Tests
579-----
580
581Windows
582-------
583
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000584- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
585 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
586 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
587 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
588
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000589- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
590 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
591 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
592
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000593Mac
594----
595
596
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000597What's New in Python 2.3 final?
598===============================
599
600*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
601
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000602IDLE
603----
604
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000605- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
606 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
607 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
608 context-menu actions.
609
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000610- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
611 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
612 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
613 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
614 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
615 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
616 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
617 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
618 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
619
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000620
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000621What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
622=============================================
623
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000624*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000625
626Core and builtins
627-----------------
628
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000629- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000630 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000631 comment at the end are still unsupported.
632
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000633Extension modules
634-----------------
635
636- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
637 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
638 than once. This has been fixed.
639
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000640- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
641 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
642 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
643 call.
644
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000645- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
646
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000647Library
648-------
649
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000650- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
651 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
652
653- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
654 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
655 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
656 restored.
657
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000658IDLE
659----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000660
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000661- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000662
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000663Build
664-----
665
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000666- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
667 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
668
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000669C API
670-----
671
672Windows
673-------
674
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000675- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
676 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
677
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000678- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
679
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000680Mac
681---
682
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000683- Various fixes to pimp.
684
685- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
686
687- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
688 more problems than it solves.
689
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000690
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000691What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
692=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000693
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000694*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
695
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000696Core and builtins
697-----------------
698
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000699- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
700 by sys.setcheckinterval().
701
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000702- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
703 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000704 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000705
706- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
707 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
708 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000709 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000710
711- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
712 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000713
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000714- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
715 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
716 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
717
718- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000719 770247.
720
721- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000722
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000723Extension modules
724-----------------
725
726- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
727 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
728
729- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
730
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000731- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
732
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000733- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
734 contained within the _strptime module.
735
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000736- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
737 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
738
739- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000740 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
741
742- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
743 the find_class attribute, if present.
744
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000745- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000746
747 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
748 (SF bug 763298).
749
750 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000751 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
752 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
753 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000754
755 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
756
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000757Library
758-------
759
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000760- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
761
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000762- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
763 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
764 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
765 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
766 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
767 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
768 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
769 or Tester().
770
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000771- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
772 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
773 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
774 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
775 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
776 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
777 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
778 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
779 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000780
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000781 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000782
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000783- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
784 weren't before was an oversight.
785
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000786- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
787 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
788
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000789- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
790 when there are no lines.
791
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000792- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
793 which could occur with Tk 8.4
794
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000795- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
796 to child processes.
797
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000798- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
799
800- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
801
802- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
803 xmlrpclib.
804
805- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
806 responses.
807
808- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
809 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
810
811- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
812 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
813 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
814
815- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
816 used as patterns.
817
818- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
819 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
820 than Tk 8.3.
821
822- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
823
824- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000825
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000826Tools/Demos
827-----------
828
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000829- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
830
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000831- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
832
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000833- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000834
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000835Build
836-----
837
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000838- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
839
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000840- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
841
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000842- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
843 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000844
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000845- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
846 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
847 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000848
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000849C API
850-----
851
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000852- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
853 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
854
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000855Windows
856-------
857
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000858- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
859 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
860 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
861 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
862 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
863 Python exception ::
864
865 thread.error: can't start new thread
866
867 is raised now.
868
869- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
870 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
871 instead of from DLL teardown.
872
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000873Mac
874---
875
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000876- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000877 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000878 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
879 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
880 the executable in the bundle.
881
882- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000883
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000884- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
885
886- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
887 on Panther.
888
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000889What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
890================================
891
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000892*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000893
894Core and builtins
895-----------------
896
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000897- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
898 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
899 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
900 with the -i option.
901
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000902- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
903 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
904
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000905- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
906 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
907
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000908- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
909 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
910 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
911 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
912 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
913 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
914 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
915 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
916 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
917 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
918 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
919 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
920 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000921
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000922- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
923 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
924 embedded in a lambda expression.
925
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000926- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
927 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
928 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
929 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
930 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
931
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000932- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
933 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
934 matches the restriction on classic classes.
935
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000936- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
937 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
938
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000939- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
940 It's writable again.
941
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000942- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
943 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
944 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000945 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000946
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000947- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
948 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
949 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
950
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000951Extension modules
952-----------------
953
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000954- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
955 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
956
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000957- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
958 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
959 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
960 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
961
962- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
963 collection.
964
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000965- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
966 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
967 unique within a single program run.
968
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000969- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
970 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
971
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000972- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
973 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
974
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000975- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
976 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000977
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000978- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
979
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000980- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
981 Fixes SF bug #730685.
982
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000983- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
984 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
985 for many BSD-derived systems.
986
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000987
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000988Library
989-------
990
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000991- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
992 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
993 primary ones:
994
995 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
996 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
997 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
998
999 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1000 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1001 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1002 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1003 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1004 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1005
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001006- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1007 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1008 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1009 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1010 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1011 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1012 argument.
1013
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001014- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1015 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1016 in the archive.
1017
1018- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1019 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1020
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001021- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1022 569574).
1023
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001024- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1025 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1026 no more.
1027
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001028- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1029 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1030 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1031 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1032 code coverage.
1033
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001034- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1035 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1036 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001037 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1038 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001039
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001040- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1041 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1042 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001043 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001044
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001045- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1046
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001047- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1048 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1049 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1050 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1051
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001052- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1053 handling.
1054
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001055- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1056 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1057
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001058- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1059 in socket.py.
1060
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001061- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1062
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001063- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1064 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1065 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1066 opener with proxy support.
1067
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001068- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1069
1070- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1071
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001072Tools/Demos
1073-----------
1074
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001075- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1076
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001077- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1078
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001079- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1080 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001081
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001082- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1083 files.
1084
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001085Build
1086-----
1087
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001088- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001089 different root directory.
1090
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001091C API
1092-----
1093
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001094- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1095 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1096 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1097 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1098 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1099 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1100 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1101 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1102 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1103 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1104
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001105- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1106 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1107 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1108 from Python.
1109
1110
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001111New platforms
1112-------------
1113
1114None this time.
1115
1116Tests
1117-----
1118
1119- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1120 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1121
1122Windows
1123-------
1124
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001125- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1126
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001127- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1128 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1129 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1130 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1131 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1132 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1133 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1134 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1135 that's what it's for.
1136
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001137Mac
1138---
1139
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001140- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1141 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1142 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1143 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001144- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1145 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1146- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001147
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001148SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1149------------------------------------
1150
1151430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1152598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1153622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1154661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1155683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1156697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1157713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1158724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1159727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1160729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1161730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1162731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1163732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1164733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1165735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1166740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1167744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1168745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1169747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1170749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1171751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1172753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1173755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1174757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1175760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1176
1177
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001178What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1179================================
1180
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001181*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001182
1183Core and builtins
1184-----------------
1185
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001186- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1187 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1188
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001189- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1190 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1191 and cannot be strings).
1192
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001193- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1194 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1195 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1196 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1197
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001198- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1199 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1200 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1201 Python itself.
1202
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001203- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1204 the referenced object, if it has one.
1205
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001206- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1207 the thread started at
1208 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1209
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001210- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1211 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1212 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1213 placed on a list index.
1214
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001215- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1216 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1217 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1218 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1219
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001220- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1221 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1222 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1223 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1224 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1225 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1226 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1227
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001228- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1229 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1230 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1231 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1232 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1233
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001234- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1235 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001236
1237- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1238 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1239 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1240 #693195.)
1241
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001242- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1243 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001244
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001245- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001246 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001247 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1248 interpreter executions, would fail.
1249
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001250- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001251 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001252 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001253
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001254Extension modules
1255-----------------
1256
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001257- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1258 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1259 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1260 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1261
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001262- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1263 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1264
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001265- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1266 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1267 and Greg Chapman.)
1268
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001269- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1270 recursively.
1271
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001272- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001273 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1274 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1275 leaks.
1276
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001277- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1278
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001279- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1280 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1281 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1282 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1283 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1284 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1285 #705836.
1286
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001287- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001288 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1289
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001290- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1291 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1292 See SF bug #692416.
1293
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001294- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1295 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1296
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001297- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1298 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1299 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001300
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001301- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001302 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1303 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1304
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001305- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1306 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1307 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1308 timeouts to work properly.
1309
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001310Library
1311-------
1312
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001313- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1314 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1315 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1316 future release.
1317
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001318- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1319 for querying platform dependent features.
1320
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001321- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001322
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001323- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1324 pickle protocol versions.
1325
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001326- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1327 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1328 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1329
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001330- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1331
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001332- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1333 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1334 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1335 modules.
1336
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001337- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1338 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1339 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1340
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001341- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1342 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1343
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001344- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1345 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1346 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1347
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001348- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001349 MS Office extensions.
1350
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001351- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1352 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1353
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001354- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1355 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1356
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001357- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1358 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1359 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1360 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1361 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1362 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1363
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001364- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1365 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1366 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001367
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001368- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1369 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1370 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1371
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001372- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1373
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001374- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1375 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1376 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1377
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001378Tools/Demos
1379-----------
1380
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001381- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1382 See the module docstring for details.
1383
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001384Build
1385-----
1386
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001387- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1388 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001389
1390C API
1391-----
1392
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001393- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1394
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001395- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1396 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1397 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1398
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001399- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1400 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001401
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001402 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1403 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1404 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001405
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001406- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001407 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1408
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001409- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1410 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1411 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001412
1413New platforms
1414-------------
1415
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001416None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001417
1418Tests
1419-----
1420
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001421- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1422 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001423
1424Windows
1425-------
1426
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001427- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1428 function.
1429
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001430- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1431 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001432
1433Mac
1434---
1435
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001436- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1437 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001438
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001439- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1440 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001441
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001442- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1443 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1444 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001445
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001446- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001447 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1448 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001449
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001450- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1451 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001452
1453
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001454What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1455=================================
1456
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001457*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001458
1459Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001460-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001461
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001462- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1463 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1464 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1465
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001466- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1467 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1468 (SF patch #664376.)
1469
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001470- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1471 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1472 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1473 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1474 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1475 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001476 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001477
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001478- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1479 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1480 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1481 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001482 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001483
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001484- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1485 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1486 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1487 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1488 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1489 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1490 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1491 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1492 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1493 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1494 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1495
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001496- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1497 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1498 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1499 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1500 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1501 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1502
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001503- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1504 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1505
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001506- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1507 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1508 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1509 case.)
1510
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001511- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1512 passed as unicode strings.
1513
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001514- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1515 See SF bug #683467.
1516
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001517- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1518 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1519
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001520- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1521
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001522- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1523
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001524- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1525 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1526 arguments.
1527
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001528- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1529 See SF bug #667147.
1530
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001531- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001532 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001533 See SF bug #676155.
1534
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001535- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001536 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001537 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1538 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1539 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1540 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1541 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1542 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001543
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001544Extension modules
1545-----------------
1546
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001547- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1548 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1549 tp_as_number pointer.
1550
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001551- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1552 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1553 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1554 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1555 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1556
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001557- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1558
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001559- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1560
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001561- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001562 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001563 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1564 patch #678531.)
1565
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001566- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1567 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1568
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001569- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1570 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1571
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001572- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1573
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001574- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1575 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1576 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1577
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001578- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1579
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001580- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1581 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1582
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001583- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001584
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001585- datetime changes:
1586
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001587 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1588
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001589 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1590 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1591 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1592 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1593 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1594 now.
1595
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001596 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001597 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1598 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001599
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001600 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001601 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001602 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1603 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1604 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1605 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001606
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001607 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1608 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1609 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001610 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1611
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001612 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1613 by a later example coded by Guido.
1614
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001615 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001616 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1617 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1618 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001619 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1620 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1621
1622 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1623 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1624 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1625 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1626 tzinfo subclass instance.
1627
1628 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1629 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1630 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1631 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1632 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1633 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1634 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1635 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001636
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001637 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1638 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1639 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1640 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1641 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001642 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1643
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001644 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001645
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001646 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1647 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1648 as a naive datetime object.
1649
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001650 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1651 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1652 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1653
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001654 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1655 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1656 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1657 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1658 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1659 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1660 comparison.
1661
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001662 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1663 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1664 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1665 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001666 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001667
1668 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001669
1670 and ::
1671
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001672 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1673
1674 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1675 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1676 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1677 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1678
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001679 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1680 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1681 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1682 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1683 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1684
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001685 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1686 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001687 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1688 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001689
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001690Library
1691-------
1692
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001693- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1694 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1695
1696- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1697 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1698 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1699 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1700 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1701 See PEP 307 for details.
1702
1703- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1704 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1705
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001706- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1707 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001708 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001709 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1710 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001711 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001712
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001713- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1714 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1715
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001716- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1717 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1718 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1719
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001720- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1721
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001722- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1723 exception.
1724
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001725- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1726 class.
1727
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001728- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1729 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1730 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1731
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001732- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1733 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1734
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001735- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001736 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1737 See SF bug #659228.
1738
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001739- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1740 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1741 See SF patch #651082.
1742
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001743- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001744
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001745- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1746 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1747
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001748- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001749 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001750
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001751- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1752 DOS paths from other platforms.
1753
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001754Tools/Demos
1755-----------
1756
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001757- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1758 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1759 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1760 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1761 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1762 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1763 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1764 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1765 example:
1766
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001767 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1768 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001769
1770 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1771
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001772
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001773Build
1774-----
1775
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001776- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1777 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1778 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001779 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1780
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001781 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1782
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001783- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1784 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1785 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1786 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1787 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1788 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1789 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1790 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1791 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1792
1793- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1794 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1795 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1796 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1797
1798- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1799 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1800
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001801C API
1802-----
1803
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001804- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1805 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001806
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001807- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1808 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1809 tp_as_number pointer.
1810
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001811- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1812 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1813 (SF #681367)
1814
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001815- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1816 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1817 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1818 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001819
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001820Tests
1821-----
1822
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001823- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001824 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1825 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1826 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1827 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1828 pydoc.)
1829
1830- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1831
1832- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001833
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001834Windows
1835-------
1836
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001837- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1838 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1839 time).
1840
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001841- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1842 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1843
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001844- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1845 release without strong cryptography.
1846
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001847- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001848 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001849
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001850- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1851 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1852
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001853Mac
1854---
1855
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001856- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1857 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001858
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001859- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1860 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1861 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001862
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001863- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1864 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001865
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001866- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1867 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1868 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1869 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001870
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001871- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001872 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1873 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1874 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001875
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001876
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001877What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001878=================================
1879
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001880*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001881
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001882Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001883--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001884
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001885- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1886
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001887- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1888 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001889 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001890 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001891 a different meaning than before.
1892
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001893- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001894 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001895 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001896
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001897- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001898 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001899 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001900
1901- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1902 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1903 and deallocation.
1904
1905- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1906 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1907
1908- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1909 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1910 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1911 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1912 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1913
1914- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1915 now detected by the garbage collector.
1916
1917- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1918 [SF bug 519621]
1919
1920- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1921 identifier.
1922
1923- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1924 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1925 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1926 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1927 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1928 [SF bug 563060]
1929
1930- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1931 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1932 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1933 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1934 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1935
1936- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1937 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1938 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1939
1940- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1941
1942- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1943 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1944 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1945 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1946 state of the slots would be lost.)
1947
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001948Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001949-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001950
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001951- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001952 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1953 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1954 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1955 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001956 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1957 Jython 2.1.
1958
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001959- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001960 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001961 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1962 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1963 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1964 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1965 these, see PEP 302.
1966
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001967- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1968 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1969 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1970
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001971- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1972 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1973 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1974
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001975- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1976 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1977 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1978
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001979- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1980 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1981 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1982 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1983 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1984 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1985 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1986 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1987 releases or implementations.
1988
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001989- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001990 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1991 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001992
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001993- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1994 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1995
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001996- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1997 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1998 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1999
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002000- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2001 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2002
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002003- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2004 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002005 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2006 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002007
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002008- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2009 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2010 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2011 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2012 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2013
2014 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2015 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2016 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2017 pattern.
2018
2019 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2020 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2021 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2022 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2023
2024 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2025 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2026 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2027 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2028 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2029 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2030
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002031- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2032 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2033 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2034 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2035 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2036 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2037 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2038 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002039
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002040- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2041 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2042 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2043 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2044 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002045 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2046 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2047 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2048 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2049 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2050 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2051 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002052
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002053- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2054 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2055
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002056- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2057 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2058 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2059 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2060 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2061 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2062 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2063 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2064 to Zack Weinberg!
2065
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002066- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2067 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2068 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2069 type. This has been fixed now.
2070
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002071- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2072 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2073 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2074
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002075- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2076 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2077 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2078 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2079 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2080 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2081 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2082 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002083 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002084
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002085- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2086 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2087 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002088
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002089- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2090 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2091 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2092 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2093 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2094 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2095 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2096 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002097 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002098 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2099 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2100
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002101- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2102 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2103 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2104 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2105 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2106 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2107 this.)
2108
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002109- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2110 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002111 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002112 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002113 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2114 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002115 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2116 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002117
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002118- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2119 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2120 currently running.
2121
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002122- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2123 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2124 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2125 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2126
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002127- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2128 as directory names.
2129
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002130- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2131 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2132
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002133- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2134 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2135
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002136- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002137 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2138 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002139
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002140- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2141 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2142 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2143 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2144 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2145
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002146- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2147 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2148 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2149 removed.
2150
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002151- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2152 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2153 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2154
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002155- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2156 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2157 to __debug__.
2158
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002159- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2160 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2161 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2162
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002163- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2164 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2165 deprecated now.
2166
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002167- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2168 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2169 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002170
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002171- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2172 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2173 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2174 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2175 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002176
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002177- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2178 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2179
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002180- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2181 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2182 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002183 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002184 is backward compatible.
2185
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002186- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2187 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2188 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2189 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2190 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2191
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002192- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2193 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2194 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2195 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2196 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2197 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002198
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002199- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2200 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2201
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002202- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2203 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2204
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002205- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2206 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2207 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2208 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2209 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2210
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002211- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2212 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2213 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2214
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002215- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002216 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2217
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002218- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2219 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2220 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002221
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002222- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2223 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2224
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002225- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2226 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2227 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2228
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002229- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2230
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002231Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002232-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002233
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002234- Added three operators to the operator module:
2235 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2236 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2237 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2238
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002239- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2240
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002241- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2242 archives.
2243
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002244- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2245 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2246 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2247
2248 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2249
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002250- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2251 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2252 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002253 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002254
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002255- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2256 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2257 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2258 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002259 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2260 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2261 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2262 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002263
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002264- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2265 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002266
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002267- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2268
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002269- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2270 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2271
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002272- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2273 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2274 supported.
2275
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002276- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2277
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002278- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2279 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002280
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002281- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2282 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2283
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002284- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2285
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002286- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2287 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2288
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002289- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2290 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2291 functions but callable type objects.
2292
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002293- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002294 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002295 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002296
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002297- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2298 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002299
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002300- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2301 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002302
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002303- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2304 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2305 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2306 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2307
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002308- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2309 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002310
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002311- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2312 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2313 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2314 and __imul__.
2315
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002316- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002317 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2318 is called.
2319
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002320- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2321 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2322 interpreter was compiled.
2323
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002324- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2325 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2326 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002327 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002328 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2329 1, not 2.
2330
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002331- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2332 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2333 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2334 limit.
2335
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002336- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2337 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2338 bug #623464.
2339
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002340- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2341 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2342 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2343 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2344
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002345Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002346-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002347
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002348- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2349
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002350- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2351 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2352 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2353 with Python 2.3a2.
2354
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002355- os.path exposes getctime.
2356
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002357- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002358 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002359 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002360 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002361 unit tests of floating point results.
2362
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002363- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2364 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2365 has been increased.
2366
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002367- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2368 executed.
2369
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002370- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2371 postinstallation script.
2372
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002373- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2374 test the current module.
2375
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002376- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002377 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2378 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2379 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2380 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2381
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002382- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002383 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002384 Ward's Optik package.
2385
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002386- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2387 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2388 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2389 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2390
2391- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2392 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002393 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002394
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002395- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2396 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2397 shelf are binary pickles.
2398
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002399- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2400 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2401
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002402- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2403 modules are iterators now.
2404
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002405- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2406 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2407 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2408 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2409 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2410 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002411
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002412- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2413 with their entity value.
2414
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002415- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2416
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002417- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2418 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002419
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002420- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2421 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002422 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002423
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002424- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2425 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2426 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2427 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2428 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2429 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2430 main():
2431
2432 import locale
2433 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2434
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002435- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2436 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2437
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002438- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2439 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2440 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2441 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2442 to the new standard.
2443
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002444- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2445 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2446 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2447 an extension to the database.
2448
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002449- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2450 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2451 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2452 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002453 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002454
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002455- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002456 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002457
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002458- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2459 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2460 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2461 bounded integers.
2462
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002463- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2464 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2465 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2466 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2467 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2468 in existence.
2469
2470 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2471 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2472 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2473 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2474 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2475 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2476
2477 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2478 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2479 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2480 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2481
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002482- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2483 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2484 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2485
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002486- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2487
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002488- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2489 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2490 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2491 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2492
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002493- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2494 argument.
2495
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002496- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2497 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2498 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2499 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2500 [SF patch 560794].
2501
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002502- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2503 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2504 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002505 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2506 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2507 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002508
2509- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2510 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002511
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002512- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2513 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2514 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2515 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002516
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002517- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2518 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2519 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2520 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2521 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2522
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002523- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002524
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002525- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2526
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002527- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2528 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2529 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2530 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2531 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2532 identical to None.
2533
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002534- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2535 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2536 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2537 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2538 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2539 results now.
2540
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002541- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2542 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2543
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002544- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2545 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2546 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2547 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2548 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2549 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2550 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2551 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2552
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002553- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2554
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002555- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2556 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2557
2558- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2559 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2560 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2561 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2562 and other systems.
2563
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002564- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2565 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2566 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2567 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 +00002568 work well with these.
2569
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002570- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2571
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002572- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002573 connections.
2574
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002575- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2576 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2577 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2578
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002579- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2580 sets
2581
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002582- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2583 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2584 name.
2585
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002586- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2587 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2588 passed in.
2589
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002590- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002591 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002592 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2593 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002594
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002595- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2596
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002597- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2598
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002599- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2600 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2601 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2602
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002603- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2604 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2605 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2606 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002607 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002608
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002609- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002610 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002611 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002612
2613- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2614 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2615 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2616
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002617- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002618 the value of its expression argument.
2619
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002620- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2621 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2622 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2623
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002624- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2625 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2626 skipstone browser was included.
2627
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002628- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2629 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2630
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002631Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002632-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002633
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002634- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2635 names in addition to accepting file names.
2636
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002637- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2638 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2639 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2640 still used and useful.)
2641
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002642- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2643 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2644 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2645 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002646
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002647- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2648 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2649 the generated binary.
2650
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002651Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002652-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002653
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002654- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2655
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002656- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2657 except in the hands of experts.
2658
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002659- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002660 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2661 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2662 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002663
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002664- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2665 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2666 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2667 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2668 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2669 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2670 builds.
2671
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002672- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2673 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2674 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2675 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2676 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2677 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2678 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2679 new type.
2680
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002681- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002682
2683 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2684 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2685 positive infinities.
2686
2687 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2688 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2689 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2690 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2691 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2692 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2693 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2694
2695 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2696
2697 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2698
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002699- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2700 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2701 size of the executable.
2702
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002703- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2704 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2705 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2706 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002707
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002708- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2709
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002710- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2711 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2712 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002713
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002714- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2715 well as Unix.
2716
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002717- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2718 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2719 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2720 modules in the README file for details.
2721
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002722C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002723-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002724
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002725- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2726 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002727 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002728 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002729 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002730
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002731- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2732 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2733 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2734 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2735 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2736 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002737 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002738 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2739 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2740 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2741 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2742 aligned.)
2743
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002744- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2745 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2746 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2747
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002748- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2749 level.
2750
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002751- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2752 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2753 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2754 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2755 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2756
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002757- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2758 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2759 code.
2760
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002761- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2762 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2763 adjusting for negative indices.
2764
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002765- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2766 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2767 object.
2768
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002769- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2770 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2771 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2772
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002773- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2774 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002775
2776- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2777
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002778- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2779 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2780 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2781 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2782
2783- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2784
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002785- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002786
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002787- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002788 without going through the buffer API.
2789
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002790- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002791
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002792- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2793 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2794 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2795 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2796
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002797- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2798 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2799
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002800- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002801 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2802
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002803New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002804-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002805
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002806- OpenVMS is now supported.
2807
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002808- AtheOS is now supported.
2809
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002810- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2811
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002812- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2813
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002814Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002815-----
2816
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002817- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2818 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2819 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002820
2821Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002822-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002823
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002824- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2825 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2826 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2827 bugs.
2828 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002829 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002830 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2831 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002832 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002833
2834- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002835 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002836
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002837- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2838 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2839
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002840- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2841 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002842 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002843 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2844
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002845- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2846 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2847 use files" uninstall option).
2848
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002849- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2850
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002851- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2852 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2853
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002854- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2855 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2856 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2857
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002858- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2859 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2860 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2861 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2862 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002863 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2864 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2865 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002866
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002867- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002868 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002869 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2870 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2871 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2872 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2873 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2874 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2875 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2876 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2877 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2878 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2879 work around.
2880
2881- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2882 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2883 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2884 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2885 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2886 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2887 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2888 specified with O_CREAT too).
2889
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002890Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002891----
2892
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002893- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002894
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002895- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2896 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2897 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2898
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002899- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2900 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2901 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2902
2903- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2904 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2905 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2906 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2907 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2908 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2909 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2910 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002911
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002912- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2913 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2914 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002915
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002916- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2917 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2918 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2919 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2920 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002921
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002922- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2923 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2924 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002925
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002926- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2927 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002928
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002929- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2930 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2931 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2932 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2933 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002934
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002935- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2936 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2937 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2938
2939- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2940 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2941 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002942
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002943- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2944 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2945 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2946 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002947 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002948
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002949- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2950 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002951
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002952- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2953 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002954
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002955- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002956 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002957 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2958 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002959
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002960
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002961What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002962===============================
2963
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002964*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2965
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002966Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002967--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002968
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002969- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2970 with a custom metaclass.
2971
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002972Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002973-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002974
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002975- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2976 are proxies.
2977
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002978Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002979-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002980
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002981- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2982 very short strings.
2983
2984- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2985 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2986 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2987 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2988 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2989
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002990Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002991-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002992
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002993- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2994 close or delete time).
2995
2996- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2997 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2998
2999- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3000
3001- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003002 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003003
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003004Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003005-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003006
3007Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003008-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003009
3010C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003011-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003012
3013New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003014-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003015
3016Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003017-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003018
3019Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003020-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003021
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003022- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3023
3024- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3025 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3026
3027- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3028 deleted at process exit time.
3029
3030- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3031 in backslash.
3032
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003033Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003034----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003035
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003036- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3037 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3038 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3039
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003040
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003041What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003042===========================
3043
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003044*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3045
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003046Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003047--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003048
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003049- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3050 been extensively updated. See
3051
3052 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3053
3054 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3055
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003056- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3057 deleted!
3058
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003059- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3060 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3061 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3062 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3063 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3064
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003065- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3066
3067 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3068 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3069
3070 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3071 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3072 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3073 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3074 supported anyway.
3075
3076 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3077 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3078
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003079- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3080 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3081 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3082 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3083 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003084
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003085- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3086 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3087 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3088
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003089Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003090-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003091
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003092- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3093 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3094 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3095 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3096 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3097 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003098 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3099 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3100 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3101 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003102
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003103- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3104 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3105 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3106
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003107Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003108-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003109
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003110- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3111
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003112Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003113-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003114
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003115- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3116 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3117 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3118 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3119 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3120 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3121
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003122- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3123
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003124- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3125
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003126- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3127
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003128- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3129 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3130 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3131
3132- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3133
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003134Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003135-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003136
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003137- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3138 off a search on Google.
3139
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003140Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003141-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003142
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003143- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3144 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3145 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3146 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3147 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3148 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3149 other platforms should do likewise.
3150
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003151- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3152 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3153 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3154
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003155C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003156-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003157
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003158- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3159 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3160 producing key-value pairs.
3161
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003162- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003163 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003164 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3165 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3166 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3167 previously went unchallenged.
3168
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003169New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003170-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003171
3172Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003173-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003174
3175Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003176-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003177
3178Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003179----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003180
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003181- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3182 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003183
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003184- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3185 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3186 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3187 home.
3188
3189
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003190What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003191===========================
3192
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003193*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3194
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003195Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003196--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003197
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003198- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3199 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003200
3201 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003202 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003203
3204 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3205 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003206 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003207 This needs to be documented.
3208
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003209- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3210 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3211
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003212- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3213 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3214 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3215
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003216- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3217 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3218
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003219- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3220 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3221 class forbids it).
3222
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003223- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3224 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3225 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3226
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003227- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3228
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003229Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003230-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003231
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003232- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3233 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003234 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003235
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003236- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3237 (like 1 + '').
3238
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003239Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003240-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003241
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003242- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3243 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3244 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3245 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003246 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003247 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3248
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003249- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3250 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3251 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3252 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3253
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003254- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3255 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003256 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3257 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3258 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003259
3260- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3261 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003262
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003263- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3264 bytes on its input.
3265
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003266Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003267-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003268
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003269- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003270 convenience function.
3271
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003272- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3273 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3274 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003275 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3276 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3277 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3278 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3279 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3280 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003281
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003282- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3283 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3284 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3285 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3286
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003287- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3288 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3289 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3290
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003291- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3292 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3293 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3294 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3295
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003296- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3297 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003298 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003299 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3300 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3301 new -l and -e options.
3302
3303- statcache is now deprecated.
3304
3305- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3306 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003307 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003308 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3309 time properly taken into account.
3310
3311- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3312 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3313 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3314 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3315
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003316Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003317-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003318
3319Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003320-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003321
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003322- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3323 is built with libdb3 if available.
3324
3325- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3326
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003327C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003328-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003329
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003330- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3331 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3332 PySequence_Size().
3333
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003334- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3335
3336- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3337 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3338 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3339
3340- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3341 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3342
3343- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3344 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3345
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003346New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003347-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003348
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003349- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3350 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3351
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003352- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3353 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3354
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003355- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3356
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003357Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003358-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003359
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003360- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3361 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3362
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003363Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003364-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003365
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003366Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003367----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003368
3369- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3370 removed completely in the next release.
3371
3372- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3373 OSX.
3374
3375- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3376 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3377
3378- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3379
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003380
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003381What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003382===========================
3383
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003384*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3385
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003386Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003387--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003388
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003389- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003390 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003391 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003392 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3393 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003394 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3395 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003396 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3397 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003398
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003399- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3400 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3401
3402- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3403 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3404
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003405Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003406-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003407
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003408- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3409 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3410 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3411 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3412 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3413 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3414 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3415 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3416
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003417- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3418 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3419 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3420 example).
3421
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003422- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003423 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003424 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003425 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003426
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003427- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3428 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3429 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003430 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003431
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003432- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3433 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3434 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3435 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3436 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3437 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3438
3439 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3440
3441 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3442
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003443Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003444-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003445
3446- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3447
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003448- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3449
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003450- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3451 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003452
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003453- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3454 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3455 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3456 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3457 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3458 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003459 attributes.
3460
3461- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3462 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3463 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003464
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003465- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3466 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3467 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003468
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003469- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3470 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3471 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003472 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3473 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3474
3475- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3476 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003477
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003478Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003479-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003480
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003481- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3482 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3483
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003484- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3485 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3486 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3487 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3488
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003489- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3490 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3491 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3492 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3493
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003494 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3495 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3496 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3497 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3498 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3499 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3500 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3501 without losing information).
3502
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003503- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003504 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3505 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3506 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3507 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3508 module).
3509
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003510 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003511 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3512 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3513 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3514 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003515
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003516- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003517 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3518 encoding.
3519
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003520- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3521 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3522
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003523- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003524 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3525
3526- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3527 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3528 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3529 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3530
3531- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3532
3533- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3534 ON, and OFF.
3535
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003536- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3537 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3538
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003539Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003540-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003541
3542- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3543 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3544 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003545
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003546- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3547 been added: -X and -E.
3548
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003549Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003550-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003551
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003552- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3553 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3554
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003555C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003556-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003557
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003558- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3559 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3560 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3561 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3562 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3563
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003564- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3565 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3566 as long) arguments.
3567
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003568- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3569 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3570 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3571 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3572 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3573 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3574
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003575- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3576 input.
3577
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003578New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003579-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003580
3581Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003582-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003583
3584Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003585-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003586
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003587- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3588 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3589 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3590
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003591- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3592 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3593 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003594 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003595
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003596 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3597 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3598 import signal
3599 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003600
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003601 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003602 while 1:
3603 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003604 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003605 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3606 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3607 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3608 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003609
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003610
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003611What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3612===========================
3613
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003614*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3615
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003616Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003617--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003618
3619- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3620 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3621 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3622
3623- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3624 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3625 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3626 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3627 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3628 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3629 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003630
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003631- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003632 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003633 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3634 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3635 associate a docstring with a property.
3636
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003637- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3638 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3639 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3640 other built-in object types.
3641
3642- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3643 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3644 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3645 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3646 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3647
3648- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3649 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3650
3651- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3652 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003653 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003654 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3655 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3656 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3657 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3658 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3659
3660- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3661 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3662 class.
3663
3664- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3665 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3666 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3667 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3668
3669- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3670 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3671 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3672 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3673
3674- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3675 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3676
3677- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3678 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3679 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3680 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3681 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003682 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003683 with the same value as s.
3684
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003685- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3686
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003687Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003688----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003689
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003690- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3691
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003692- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3693 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3694 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3695 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3696 objects.
3697
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003698- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3699 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003700 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3701 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3702
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003703- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3704 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3705 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3706
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003707Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003708-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003709
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003710- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3711 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3712 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3713 by the instances.
3714
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003715- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3716 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3717 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3718
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003719- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3720 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3721 before the entire comparison is complete.
3722
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003723- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3724 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3725 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3726
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003727- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3728 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3729 getwriter().
3730
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003731- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3732 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3733
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003734- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003735 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3736 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3737
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003738- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3739 iterable object.
3740
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003741- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3742 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003743
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003744- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3745 authentication.
3746
3747- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3748 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003749
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003750- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003751 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3752 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3753 a sample driver.)
3754
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003755Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003756-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003757
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003758- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3759 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3760 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3761 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3762 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3763 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3764 kernel has large file support.
3765
3766- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3767 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3768 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3769 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3770 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3771
3772- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3773 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3774 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3775
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003776C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003777-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003778
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003779- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3780 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3781
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003782New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003783-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003784
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003785- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3786 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3787
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003788Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003789-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003790
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003791- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3792 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3793 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3794 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3795 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3796
3797- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3798 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3799 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3800 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3801
3802- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3803 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3804
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003805Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003806-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003807
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003808- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003809 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3810 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003811
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003812
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003813What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3814===========================
3815
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003816*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3817
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003818Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003819----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003820
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003821- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3822 big to represent as a C double.
3823
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003824- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3825 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3826 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3827 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3828 restriction).
3829
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003830- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3831 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3832 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3833 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3834 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3835
3836 >>> dir([])
3837 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3838 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3839 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3840 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3841 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3842 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3843 'reverse', 'sort']
3844
3845 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3846
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003847- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003848 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3849 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3850 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3851 OverflowError exception.
3852
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003853- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003854 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003855 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3856 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3857 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3858 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3859 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003860 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003861 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3862 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3863
3864 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3865 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3866 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3867 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003868
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003869- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003870 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3871 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3872 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3873 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3874 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3875 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3876 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3877 once it is created.
3878
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003879- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3880 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3881 (key, value) pairs.
3882
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003883- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003884 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3885 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3886
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003887- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3888 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3889 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3890 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3891 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003892
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003893- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003894 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3895 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3896
3897 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3898
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003899- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003900 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3901
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003902Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003903-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003904
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003905- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003906 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3907 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003908
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003909- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3910 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3911 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3912 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3913 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3914 in this area anymore).
3915
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003916- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3917 threading.Timer.
3918
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003919- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3920 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3921
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003922- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003923 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3924
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003925- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003926 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3927 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3928 converted to Python longs.
3929
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003930- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003931 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3932
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003933- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3934 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3935 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3936
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003937Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003938-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003939
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003940- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3941 division operators as per PEP 238.
3942
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003943Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003944-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003945
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003946- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3947 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3948 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3949 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3950
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003951C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003952-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003953
3954- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003955
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003956- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3957 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003958 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003959
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003960 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3961 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003962 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003963 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003964
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003965- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003966 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3967 module:
3968
3969 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003970
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003971 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3972 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003973
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003974 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3975 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003976
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003977 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3978
3979 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3980
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003981- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003982 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3983 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3984 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003985
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003986New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003987-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003988
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003989- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3990 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3991 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3992 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3993 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003994
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003995Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003996-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003997
3998Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003999-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004000
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004001- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4002 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4003 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4004 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004005 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4006 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4007 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4008 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4009 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004010
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004011- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004012 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4013
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004014
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004015What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4016===========================
4017
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004018*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4019
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004020Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004021-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004022
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004023- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4024 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4025
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004026- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4027 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4028 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004029
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004030- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4031 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4032 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4033 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004034
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004035- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4036
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004037- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004038
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004039Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004040-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004041
4042- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004043 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004044 the module docstring for details.
4045
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004046Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004047-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004048
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004049- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004050 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4051 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4052 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004053
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004054- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4055 Nick Mathewson.
4056
4057Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004058----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004059
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004060- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4061 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4062 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4063 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4064 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4065 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4066 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4067 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4068
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004069- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4070 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4071 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4072 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4073
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004074- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4075 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4076 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4077 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4078 come a long way).
4079
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004080- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4081 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4082 write filters for these warnings).
4083
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004084- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4085 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4086 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4087 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4088 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4089
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004090- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4091 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4092 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4093 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4094 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4095 older distribution.
4096
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004097Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004098-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004099
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004100- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4101 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004102 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004103
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004104- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4105 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4106 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4107
4108- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4109
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004110- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4111
4112- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4113
4114- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4115
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004116- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004117
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004118- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4119
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004120New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004121-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004122
4123C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004124-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004125
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004126- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4127 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4128 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4129 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4130 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4131 against buffer overruns.
4132
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004133- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004134 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4135 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004136 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4137 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4138 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4139
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004140- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4141 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4142 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4143 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4144 deprecated.
4145
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004146Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004147-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004148
4149- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4150 relevant is found.
4151
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004152
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004153What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004154===========================
4155
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004156*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4157
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004158Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004159----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004160
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004161- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4162 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4163 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4164 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4165 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4166 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4167 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4168 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004169 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004170 repaired.
4171
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004172- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004173 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004174 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4175 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4176 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4177 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4178 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4179 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4180 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4181 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4182
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004183- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4184 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4185 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4186 leading BMO character).
4187
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004188- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4189 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4190 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4191
4192 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4193 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4194 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004195
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004196 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4197 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4198 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4199 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4200 for various simple to use conversions.
4201
4202 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4203 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4204
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004205 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4206 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4207 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4208 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4209 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4210 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4211 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4212 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4213 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4214 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4215 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4216 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4217 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4218 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4219 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004220
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004221- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4222 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4223 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004224 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004225 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004226
4227 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004228 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4229 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4230 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4231 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4232 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004233 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4234 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004235
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004236 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4237 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4238 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004239 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004240
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004241- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4242 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4243 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4244 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4245 floating arithmetic,
4246
4247 x = 9007199254740992.0
4248 print long(x)
4249
4250 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4251 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4252 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4253 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4254 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4255 functions are of good quality).
4256
4257 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4258 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4259 algorithms to break.
4260
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004261- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4262 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4263 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4264 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4265 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4266 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4267 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4268 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4269 order.
4270
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004271- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4272 operation along the most common code paths.
4273
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004274- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4275 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4276
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004277- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4278 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4279 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4280 {}.update(UserDict())
4281
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004282- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4283 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4284 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4285 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4286 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4287 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4288 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4289 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4290
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004291- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004292 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004293
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004294 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004295 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4296 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004297 join() method of strings
4298 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004299 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4300 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004301 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004302 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004303
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004304- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4305 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4306
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004307- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4308 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4309
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004310- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4311 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4312 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4313 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4314
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004315- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4316 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004317 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004318 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4319 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004320
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004321- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4322
4323
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004324Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004325-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004326
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004327- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004328 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004329 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4330 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4331
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004332- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4333 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4334
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004335- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4336 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4337 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4338 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4339
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004340- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4341 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4342 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4343
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004344- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4345
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004346- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4347
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004348- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4349 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4350 that are still imported into string.py).
4351
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004352- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4353
4354- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4355 Now it does.
4356
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004357- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4358
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004359- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4360 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4361 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4362 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4363 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004364 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4365 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004366
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004367- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4368 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4369 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4370 'help(object)'.
4371
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004372Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004373-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004374
4375- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004376 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004377 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4378 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4379
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004380- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004381 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4382 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004383
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004384C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004385-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004386
4387- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4388 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004389
4390----
4391
4392**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**