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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
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4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
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Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00008=================================
9
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +000010*XXX Release date: DD-MMM-2002 XXX*
11
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000012Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +000013--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000014
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +000015- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old and the new
16 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +000017 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +000018
19- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
20 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
21 and deallocation.
22
23- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
24 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
25
26- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
27 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
28 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
29 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
30 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
31
32- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
33 now detected by the garbage collector.
34
35- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
36 [SF bug 519621]
37
38- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
39 identifier.
40
41- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
42 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
43 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
44 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
45 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
46 [SF bug 563060]
47
48- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
49 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
50 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
51 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
52 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
53
54- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
55 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
56 not called. [SF bug #537450]
57
58- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
59
60- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
61 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
62 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
63 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
64 state of the slots would be lost.)
65
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000066Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +000067-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000068
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +000069- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
70 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
71 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
72 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
73 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
74 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
75 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
76 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
77 releases or implementations.
78
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +000079- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +000080 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
81 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +000082
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +000083- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
84 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
85
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +000086- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
87 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
88 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
89
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +000090- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
91 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
92
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +000093- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
94 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
95 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but not kept up
96 to date).
97
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +000098- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
99 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
100 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
101 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
102 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
103
104 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
105 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
106 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
107 pattern.
108
109 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
110 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
111 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
112 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
113
114 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
115 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
116 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
117 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
118 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
119 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
120
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000121 - The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
122 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
123 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables. In
124 addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
Neal Norwitz7165af22002-09-05 21:42:24 +0000125 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
126 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
127 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
128 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000129
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000130- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
131 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
132 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
133 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
134 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000135 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
136 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
137 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
138 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
139 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
140 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
141 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000142
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000143- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
144 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
145
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000146- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
147 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
148 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
149 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
150 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
151 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
152 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
153 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
154 to Zack Weinberg!
155
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000156- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
157 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
158 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
159 type. This has been fixed now.
160
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000161- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
162 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
163 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
164
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000165- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
166 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
167 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
168 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
169 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
170 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
171 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
172 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000173 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000174
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000175- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
176 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
177 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000178
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000179- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
180 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
181 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
182 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
183 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
184 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
185 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
186 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000187 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000188 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
189 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
190
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000191- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
192 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
193 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
194 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
195 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
196 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
197 this.)
198
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000199- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
200 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000201 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000202 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000203 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
204 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000205 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
206 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000207
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000208- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
209 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
210 currently running.
211
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000212- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
213 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
214 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
215 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
216
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000217- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
218 as directory names.
219
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000220- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
221 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
222
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000223- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
224 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
225
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000226- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000227 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
228 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000229
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000230- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
231 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
232 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
233 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
234 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
235
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000236- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
237 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
238 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
239 removed.
240
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000241- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
242 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
243 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
244
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000245- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
246 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
247 to __debug__.
248
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000249- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
250 string to the left with zeros. For example,
251 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
252
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000253- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
254 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
255 deprecated now.
256
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000257- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
258 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
259 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000260
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000261- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
262 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
263
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000264- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
265 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
266 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000267 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000268 is backward compatible.
269
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000270- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
271 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
272 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
273 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
274 could access a pointer to freed memory.
275
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000276- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
277 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
278 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
279 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
280 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
281 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000282
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000283- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
284 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
285
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000286- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
287 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
288
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000289- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
290 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
291 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
292 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
293 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
294
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000295- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
296 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
297 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
298
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000299- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000300 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
301
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000302Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000303-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000304
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000305- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
306
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000307- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
308 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
309
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000310- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
311 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
312 supported.
313
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000314- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
315
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000316- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
317 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000318
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000319- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
320 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
321
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000322- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
323
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000324- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
325 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
326
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000327- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
328 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
329 functions but callable type objects.
330
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000331- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000332 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000333 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000334
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +0000335- posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and posix.getpgid have been
336 added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000337
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000338- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
339 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000340
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000341- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
342 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
343 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
344 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
345
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000346- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
347 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000348
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000349- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
350 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
351 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
352 and __imul__.
353
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000354- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000355 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
356 is called.
357
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000358- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
359 been added where available.
360
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000361- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
362 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
363 interpreter was compiled.
364
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000365- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
366 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
367 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000368 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000369 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
370 1, not 2.
371
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000372- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
373 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
374 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
375 limit.
376
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000377- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
378 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
379 bug #623464.
380
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000381Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000382-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000383
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +0000384- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
385 modules are iterators now.
386
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +0000387- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
388 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
389 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
390 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
391 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
392 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000393
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +0000394- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
395 with their entity value.
396
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +0000397- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
398
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000399- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
400 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +0000401
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000402- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
403 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000404 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +0000405
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +0000406- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
407 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
408 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
409 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
410 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
411 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
412 main():
413
414 import locale
415 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
416
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +0000417- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
418 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
419
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +0000420- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
421 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
422 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
423 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
424 to the new standard.
425
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +0000426- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
427 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
428 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
429 an extension to the database.
430
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000431- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
432 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
433 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
434 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
435 is the base class of the two. (This is not documented yet, but
436 help(sets) gives a wealth of information.)
437
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000438- Added operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to a**b.
439
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000440- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000441 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000442
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000443- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
444 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
445 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
446 bounded integers.
447
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +0000448- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
449 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
450 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
451
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +0000452- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
453
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000454- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
455 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
456 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
457 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
458
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +0000459- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
460 argument.
461
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +0000462- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
463 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
464 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
465 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
466 [SF patch 560794].
467
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000468- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
469 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
470 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000471 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
472 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
473 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000474
475- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
476 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +0000477
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +0000478- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
479 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
480 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
481 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +0000482
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +0000483- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
484 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
485 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
486 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
487 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
488
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000489- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +0000490
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +0000491- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
492 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
493 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
494 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
495 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
496 identical to None.
497
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +0000498- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
499 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
500 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
501 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
502 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
503 results now.
504
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +0000505- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
506 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
507
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000508- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
509 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
510 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
511 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
512 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
513 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
514 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
515 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
516
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +0000517- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
518
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +0000519- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
520 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
521
522- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
523 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
524 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
525 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
526 and other systems.
527
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000528- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
529 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
530 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
531 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 +0000532 work well with these.
533
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +0000534- compileall now supports quiet operation.
535
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000536- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +0000537 connections.
538
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +0000539- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
540 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
541 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
542
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +0000543- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
544 sets
545
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +0000546- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
547 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
548 name.
549
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +0000550- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
551 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
552 passed in.
553
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000554- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +0000555 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
556 on a per-message basis.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +0000557
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +0000558- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
559
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +0000560- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
561
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +0000562- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
563 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
564 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
565
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000566- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
567 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
568 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
569 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
570 honored.
571
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000572- distutils' build_ext command now links c++ extensions with the c++
573 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
574 running under *nix.
575
576- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
577 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
578 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
579
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +0000580- New pdb command `pp' which is like `p' except that it pretty-prints
581 the value of its expression argument.
582
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000583- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
584 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
585 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
586
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000587Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000588-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000589
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +0000590- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
591 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
592 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
593 still used and useful.)
594
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +0000595- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
596 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
597 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
598 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +0000599
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +0000600- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
601 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
602 the generated binary.
603
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000604Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000605-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000606
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +0000607- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
608
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000609- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
610 except in the hands of experts.
611
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000612- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000613 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
614 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
615 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +0000616
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +0000617- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
618 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
619 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
620 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
621 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
622 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
623 builds.
624
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000625- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
626 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
627 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
628 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
629 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
630 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
631 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
632 new type.
633
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +0000634- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +0000635
636 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
637 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
638 positive infinities.
639
640 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
641 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
642 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
643 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
644 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
645 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
646 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
647
648 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
649
650 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
651
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +0000652- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
653 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
654 size of the executable.
655
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000656- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
657 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
658 configure script. On other platforms, remove
659 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +0000660
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +0000661- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
662
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +0000663- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
664 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
665 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +0000666
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +0000667- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
668 well as Unix.
669
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +0000670- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
671 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
672 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
673 modules in the README file for details.
674
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000675C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000676-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000677
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000678- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
679 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
680 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
681 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
682 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
683 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
684 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
685 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
686 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
687 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
688 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
689 aligned.)
690
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +0000691- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
692 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
693 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
694
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000695- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
696 level.
697
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +0000698- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
699 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
700 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
701 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
702 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
703
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +0000704- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
705 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
706 code.
707
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +0000708- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
709 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
710 adjusting for negative indices.
711
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000712- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
713 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
714 object.
715
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +0000716- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
717 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
718 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
719
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000720- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
721 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +0000722
723- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
724
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +0000725- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
726 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
727 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
728 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
729
730- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
731
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +0000732- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000733
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000734- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +0000735 without going through the buffer API.
736
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000737- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +0000738
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +0000739- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
740 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
741 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
742 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
743
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000744- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
745 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
746
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +0000747- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000748 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
749
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000750New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000751-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000752
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +0000753- AtheOS is now supported.
754
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +0000755- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
756
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +0000757- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
758
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000759Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000760-----
761
762Yet to be written.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000763
764Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000765-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000766
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +0000767- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
768 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
769 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
770 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
771
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +0000772- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
773 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
774 use files" uninstall option).
775
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +0000776- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
777
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +0000778- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
779 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
780
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +0000781- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
782 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
783 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
784
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +0000785- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
786 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
787 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
788 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
789 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +0000790 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
791 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
792 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +0000793
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000794- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000795 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000796 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
797 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
798 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
799 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
800 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
801 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
802 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
803 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
804 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
805 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
806 work around.
807
808- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
809 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
810 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
811 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
812 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
813 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
814 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
815 specified with O_CREAT too).
816
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000817Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000818----
819
820Yet to be written.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000821
822
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000823What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000824===============================
825
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000826*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
827
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000828Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000829--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000830
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000831- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
832 with a custom metaclass.
833
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000834Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000835-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000836
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000837- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
838 are proxies.
839
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000840Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000841-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000842
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000843- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
844 very short strings.
845
846- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
847 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
848 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
849 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
850 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
851
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000852Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000853-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000854
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000855- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
856 close or delete time).
857
858- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
859 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
860
861- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
862
863- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000864 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000865
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000866Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000867-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000868
869Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000870-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000871
872C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000873-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000874
875New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000876-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000877
878Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000879-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000880
881Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000882-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000883
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000884- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
885
886- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
887 instances are deleted at process exit time.
888
889- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
890 deleted at process exit time.
891
892- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
893 in backslash.
894
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000895Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000896----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000897
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000898- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
899 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
900 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
901
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000902
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +0000903What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000904===========================
905
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000906*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
907
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000908Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000909--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000910
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +0000911- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
912 been extensively updated. See
913
914 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
915
916 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
917
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +0000918- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
919 deleted!
920
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +0000921- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
922 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
923 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
924 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
925 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
926
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +0000927- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
928
929 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
930 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
931
932 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
933 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
934 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
935 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
936 supported anyway.
937
938 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
939 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
940
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +0000941- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
942 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
943 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
944 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
945 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +0000946
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +0000947- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
948 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
949 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
950
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000951Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000952-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000953
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +0000954- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
955 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
956 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
957 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
958 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
959 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +0000960 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
961 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
962 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
963 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +0000964
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +0000965- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
966 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
967 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
968
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000969Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000970-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000971
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +0000972- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
973
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000974Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000975-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000976
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +0000977- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
978 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
979 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
980 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
981 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
982 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
983
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +0000984- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
985
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +0000986- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
987
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +0000988- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
989
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +0000990- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
991 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
992 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
993
994- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
995
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000996Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000997-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000998
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +0000999- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1000 off a search on Google.
1001
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001002Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001003-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001004
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001005- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1006 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1007 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1008 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1009 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1010 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1011 other platforms should do likewise.
1012
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001013- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1014 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1015 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1016
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001017C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001018-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001019
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001020- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1021 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1022 producing key-value pairs.
1023
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001024- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001025 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001026 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1027 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1028 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1029 previously went unchallenged.
1030
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001031New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001032-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001033
1034Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001035-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001036
1037Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001038-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001039
1040Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001041----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001042
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001043- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1044 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001045
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001046- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1047 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1048 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1049 home.
1050
1051
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001052What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001053===========================
1054
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001055*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1056
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001057Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001058--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001059
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001060- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1061 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001062
1063 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001064 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001065
1066 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1067 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001068 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001069 This needs to be documented.
1070
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001071- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1072 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1073
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001074- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1075 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1076 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1077
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001078- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1079 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1080
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001081- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1082 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1083 class forbids it).
1084
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001085- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1086 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1087 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1088
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001089- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1090
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001091Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001092-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001093
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001094- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1095 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001096 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001097
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001098- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1099 (like 1 + '').
1100
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001101Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001102-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001103
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001104- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1105 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1106 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1107 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001108 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001109 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1110
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001111- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1112 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1113 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1114 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1115
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001116- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1117 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001118 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1119 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1120 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001121
1122- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1123 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001124
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001125- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1126 bytes on its input.
1127
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001128Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001129-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001130
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001131- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001132 convenience function.
1133
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001134- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1135 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1136 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001137 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1138 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1139 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1140 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1141 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1142 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001143
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001144- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1145 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1146 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1147 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1148
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001149- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1150 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1151 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1152
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001153- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1154 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1155 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1156 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1157
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001158- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1159 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001160 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001161 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1162 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1163 new -l and -e options.
1164
1165- statcache is now deprecated.
1166
1167- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1168 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001169 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001170 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1171 time properly taken into account.
1172
1173- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1174 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1175 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1176 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1177
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001178Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001179-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001180
1181Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001182-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001183
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001184- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1185 is built with libdb3 if available.
1186
1187- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1188
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001189C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001190-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001191
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001192- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1193 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1194 PySequence_Size().
1195
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001196- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1197
1198- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1199 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1200 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1201
1202- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1203 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1204
1205- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1206 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1207
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001208New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001209-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001210
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001211- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1212 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1213
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001214- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1215 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1216
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001217- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1218
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001219Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001220-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001221
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001222- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1223 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1224
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001225Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001226-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001227
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001228Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001229----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001230
1231- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1232 removed completely in the next release.
1233
1234- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1235 OSX.
1236
1237- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1238 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1239
1240- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1241
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001242
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001243What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001244===========================
1245
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001246*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
1247
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001248Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001249--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001250
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001251- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001252 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001253 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001254 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
1255 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001256 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
1257 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001258 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
1259 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00001260
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00001261- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
1262 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
1263
1264- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
1265 class methods, static methods, and properties.
1266
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001267Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001268-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001269
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00001270- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
1271 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
1272 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
1273 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
1274 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
1275 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
1276 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
1277 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
1278
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001279- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
1280 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
1281 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
1282 example).
1283
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001284- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001285 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001286 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001287 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001288
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001289- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
1290 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
1291 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00001292 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001293
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001294- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
1295 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
1296 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
1297 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
1298 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
1299 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
1300
1301 isinstance(x, (A, B))
1302
1303 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
1304
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001305Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001306-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001307
1308- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
1309
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001310- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
1311
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001312- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
1313 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00001314
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001315- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
1316 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
1317 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
1318 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
1319 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
1320 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00001321 attributes.
1322
1323- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
1324 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
1325 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00001326
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001327- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
1328 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
1329 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001330
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001331- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
1332 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
1333 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001334 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
1335 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
1336
1337- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
1338 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001339
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001340Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001341-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001342
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00001343- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
1344 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
1345
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001346- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
1347 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
1348 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
1349 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
1350
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00001351- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
1352 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
1353 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
1354 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
1355
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00001356 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
1357 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
1358 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
1359 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
1360 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
1361 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
1362 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
1363 without losing information).
1364
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001365- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00001366 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
1367 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
1368 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
1369 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
1370 module).
1371
1372 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
1373 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
1374 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
1375 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
1376 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001377
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001378- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00001379 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
1380 encoding.
1381
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00001382- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
1383 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
1384
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001385- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001386 to allow saving the message body to a file.
1387
1388- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
1389 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
1390 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
1391 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
1392
1393- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
1394
1395- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
1396 ON, and OFF.
1397
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001398- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
1399 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
1400
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001401Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001402-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001403
1404- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
1405 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
1406 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001407
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001408- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
1409 been added: -X and -E.
1410
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001411Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001412-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001413
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001414- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
1415 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
1416
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001417C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001418-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001419
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00001420- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
1421 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
1422 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
1423 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
1424 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
1425
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00001426- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
1427 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
1428 as long) arguments.
1429
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001430- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
1431 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
1432 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
1433 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
1434 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
1435 report any bugs or strange behavior).
1436
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001437- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
1438 input.
1439
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001440New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001441-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001442
1443Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001444-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001445
1446Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001447-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001448
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00001449- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
1450 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
1451 is created for .py and .pyw files.
1452
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001453- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
1454 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
1455 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001456 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001457
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001458 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
1459 # (SIGINT) behavior.
1460 import signal
1461 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001462
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001463 try:
1464 while 1:
1465 pass
1466 except KeyboardInterrupt:
1467 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
1468 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
1469 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
1470 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001471
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001472
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001473What's New in Python 2.2a4?
1474===========================
1475
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001476*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
1477
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001478Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001479--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001480
1481- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
1482 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
1483 documentation for all operations on list objects.
1484
1485- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
1486 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
1487 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
1488 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
1489 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
1490 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
1491 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001492
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001493- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001494 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001495 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
1496 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
1497 associate a docstring with a property.
1498
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001499- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
1500 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
1501 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
1502 other built-in object types.
1503
1504- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
1505 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
1506 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
1507 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
1508 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
1509
1510- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
1511 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
1512
1513- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
1514 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001515 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001516 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
1517 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
1518 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
1519 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
1520 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
1521
1522- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
1523 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
1524 class.
1525
1526- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
1527 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
1528 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
1529 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
1530
1531- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
1532 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
1533 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
1534 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
1535
1536- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
1537 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
1538
1539- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
1540 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
1541 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
1542 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
1543 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001544 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001545 with the same value as s.
1546
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00001547- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
1548
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001549Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001550----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001551
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00001552- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
1553
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00001554- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
1555 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
1556 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
1557 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
1558 objects.
1559
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001560- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
1561 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00001562 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
1563 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
1564
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001565- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
1566 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
1567 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
1568
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001569Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001570-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001571
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00001572- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1573 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
1574 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
1575 by the instances.
1576
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00001577- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
1578 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
1579 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
1580
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001581- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
1582 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
1583 before the entire comparison is complete.
1584
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00001585- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1586 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
1587 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
1588
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00001589- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
1590 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
1591 getwriter().
1592
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001593- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
1594 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
1595
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00001596- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001597 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
1598 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
1599
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00001600- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
1601 iterable object.
1602
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001603- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
1604 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001605
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001606- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
1607 authentication.
1608
1609- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
1610 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001611
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001612- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00001613 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
1614 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
1615 a sample driver.)
1616
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00001617Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001618-----
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001619
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001620Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001621-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001622
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001623- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
1624 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
1625 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
1626 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
1627 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
1628 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
1629 kernel has large file support.
1630
1631- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
1632 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
1633 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
1634 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
1635 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
1636
1637- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
1638 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
1639 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
1640
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001641C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001642-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001643
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001644- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
1645 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
1646
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001647New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001648-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001649
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001650- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
1651 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
1652
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001653Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001654-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001655
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001656- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
1657 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
1658 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
1659 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
1660 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
1661
1662- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
1663 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
1664 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
1665 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
1666
1667- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
1668 especially in regard to reporting errors.
1669
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001670Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001671-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001672
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001673- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001674 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
1675 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001676
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001677
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001678What's New in Python 2.2a3?
1679===========================
1680
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001681*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
1682
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001683Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001684----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001685
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001686- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
1687 big to represent as a C double.
1688
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00001689- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
1690 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
1691 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
1692 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
1693 restriction).
1694
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00001695- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
1696 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
1697 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
1698 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
1699 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
1700
1701 >>> dir([])
1702 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
1703 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
1704 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
1705 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
1706 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
1707 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
1708 'reverse', 'sort']
1709
1710 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
1711
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001712- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001713 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
1714 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
1715 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
1716 OverflowError exception.
1717
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00001718- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001719 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001720 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
1721 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
1722 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
1723 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
1724 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001725 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001726 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
1727 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
1728
1729 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
1730 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
1731 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
1732 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001733
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001734- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001735 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
1736 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
1737 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
1738 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
1739 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
1740 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
1741 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
1742 once it is created.
1743
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00001744- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
1745 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
1746 (key, value) pairs.
1747
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001748- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001749 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
1750 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
1751
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00001752- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
1753 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
1754 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
1755 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
1756 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001757
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001758- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001759 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
1760 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
1761
1762 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
1763
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001764- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00001765 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
1766
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001767Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001768-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001769
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00001770- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00001771 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
1772 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00001773
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00001774- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
1775 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
1776 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
1777 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
1778 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
1779 in this area anymore).
1780
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00001781- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
1782 threading.Timer.
1783
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00001784- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
1785 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
1786
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001787- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001788 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
1789
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001790- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00001791 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
1792 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
1793 converted to Python longs.
1794
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001795- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001796 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
1797
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00001798- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
1799 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
1800 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
1801
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001802Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001803-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001804
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001805- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
1806 division operators as per PEP 238.
1807
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001808Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001809-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001810
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001811- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
1812 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
1813 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
1814 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
1815
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00001816C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001817-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00001818
1819- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001820
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001821- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
1822 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001823 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001824
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001825 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
1826 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
1827 /* The conversion failed. */
1828 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001829
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001830- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001831 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
1832 module:
1833
1834 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001835
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001836 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
1837 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001838
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001839 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
1840 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001841
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001842 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
1843
1844 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
1845
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001846- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001847 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
1848 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
1849 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001850
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001851New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001852-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001853
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00001854- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
1855 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
1856 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
1857 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
1858 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001859
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001860Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001861-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001862
1863Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001864-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001865
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00001866- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
1867 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
1868 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
1869 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00001870 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
1871 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
1872 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
1873 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
1874 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00001875
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001876- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00001877 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
1878
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001879
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001880What's New in Python 2.2a2?
1881===========================
1882
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001883*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
1884
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001885Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001886-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001887
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00001888- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
1889 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
1890
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001891- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
1892 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
1893 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001894
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00001895- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
1896 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
1897 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
1898 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001899
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001900- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
1901
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001902- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001903
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00001904Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001905-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00001906
1907- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00001908 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00001909 the module docstring for details.
1910
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001911Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001912-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001913
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00001914- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001915 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
1916 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
1917 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00001918
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001919- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
1920 Nick Mathewson.
1921
1922Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001923----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001924
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001925- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
1926 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
1927 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
1928 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
1929 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
1930 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
1931 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
1932 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
1933
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00001934- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
1935 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
1936 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
1937 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
1938
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00001939- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
1940 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
1941 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
1942 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
1943 come a long way).
1944
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00001945- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
1946 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
1947 write filters for these warnings).
1948
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00001949- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
1950 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
1951 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
1952 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
1953 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
1954
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00001955- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
1956 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
1957 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
1958 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
1959 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
1960 older distribution.
1961
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00001962Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001963-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00001964
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00001965- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
1966 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00001967 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00001968
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00001969- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
1970 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
1971 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
1972
1973- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
1974
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001975- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
1976
1977- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
1978
1979- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
1980
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001981- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001982
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001983- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
1984
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00001985New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001986-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00001987
1988C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001989-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00001990
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00001991- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
1992 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
1993 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
1994 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
1995 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
1996 against buffer overruns.
1997
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00001998- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00001999 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2000 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002001 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2002 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2003 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2004
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002005- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2006 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2007 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2008 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2009 deprecated.
2010
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002011Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002012-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002013
2014- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2015 relevant is found.
2016
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002017
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002018What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002019===========================
2020
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002021*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2022
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002023Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002024----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002025
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002026- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2027 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2028 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2029 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2030 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2031 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2032 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2033 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002034 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002035 repaired.
2036
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002037- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002038 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002039 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2040 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2041 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2042 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2043 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2044 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2045 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2046 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2047
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002048- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2049 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2050 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2051 leading BMO character).
2052
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002053- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2054 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2055 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2056
2057 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2058 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2059 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002060
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002061 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2062 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2063 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2064 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2065 for various simple to use conversions.
2066
2067 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2068 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2069
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002070 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2071 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2072 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2073 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2074 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2075 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2076 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2077 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2078 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2079 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2080 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2081 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2082 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2083 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2084 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002085
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002086- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2087 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2088 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002089 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002090 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002091
2092 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002093 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2094 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2095 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2096 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2097 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002098 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2099 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002100
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002101 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2102 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2103 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002104 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002105
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002106- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2107 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2108 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2109 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2110 floating arithmetic,
2111
2112 x = 9007199254740992.0
2113 print long(x)
2114
2115 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2116 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2117 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2118 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2119 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2120 functions are of good quality).
2121
2122 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2123 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2124 algorithms to break.
2125
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002126- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2127 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2128 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2129 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2130 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2131 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2132 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2133 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2134 order.
2135
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002136- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2137 operation along the most common code paths.
2138
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002139- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2140 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2141
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002142- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2143 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2144 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2145 {}.update(UserDict())
2146
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002147- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2148 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2149 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2150 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2151 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2152 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2153 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2154 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2155
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002156- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002157 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002158
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002159 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002160 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2161 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002162 join() method of strings
2163 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002164 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2165 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002166 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002167 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002168
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002169- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2170 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2171
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002172- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2173 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2174
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002175- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2176 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2177 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2178 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2179
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002180- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2181 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002182 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002183 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2184 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002185
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002186- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2187
2188
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002189Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002190-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002191
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002192- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002193 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002194 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2195 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2196
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002197- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2198 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2199
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002200- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2201 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2202 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2203 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2204
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002205- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2206 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2207 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2208
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002209- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2210
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002211- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2212
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002213- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2214 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2215 that are still imported into string.py).
2216
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002217- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2218
2219- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2220 Now it does.
2221
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002222- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2223
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002224- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2225 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2226 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2227 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2228 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002229 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2230 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002231
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002232- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2233 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2234 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2235 'help(object)'.
2236
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002237Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002238-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002239
2240- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002241 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002242 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
2243 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
2244
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002245- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002246 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
2247 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002248
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002249C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002250-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002251
2252- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
2253 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002254
2255----
2256
2257**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**