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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XXXX-XX-XX*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +000015- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
16 constant.
17
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +000018- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
19 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
20 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
21 large), and to anomalies such as
22 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
23 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
24 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
25 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000026
27Extension modules
28-----------------
29
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +000030- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
31 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
32 an assert failure in a debug build.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000033
34Library
35-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +000036
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +000037- Updates for the email package:
38 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
39 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
40 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
41 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
42 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
43 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
44 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
45 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
46 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
47 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
48 + Updates to documentation.
49
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +000050- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
51 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
52 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
53 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
54
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +000055- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000056
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +000057- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
58 applications should use the getmember function.
59
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +000060- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
61
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +000062- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
63 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
64 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
65 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
66 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
67 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
68 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
69 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
70 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
71
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000072- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
73 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +000074 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000075
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +000076- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
77 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
78 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
79 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
80 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
81 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
82 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
83 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000084
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +000085- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
86 the new public features (of which there are many).
87
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +000088- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000089 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
90 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
91 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
92 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +000093 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000094
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +000095- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
96
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000097Build
98-----
99
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000100- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
101 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
102 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
103
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000104- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
105 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
106 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
107 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
108 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000109
110C API
111-----
112
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000113- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
114
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000115- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
116 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
117 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000118
119Documentation
120-------------
121
122...
123
124Tests
125-----
126
127- test__locale ported to unittest
128
129Windows
130-------
131
132...
133
134Mac
135---
136
137...
138
139New platforms
140-------------
141
142...
143
144Tools/Demos
145-----------
146
147...
148
149
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000150What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
151=================================
152
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000153*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000154
155Core and builtins
156-----------------
157
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000158- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000159 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
160
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000161- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
162 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
163 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
164 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
165 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
166 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
167 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
168 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000169 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
170 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
171 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
172 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
173 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000174
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000175- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
176 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
177 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
178 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
179 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
180
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000181- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
182
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000183- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
184 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
185
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000186- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
187 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
188 modified the list.
189
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000190- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
191 functions is now writable.
192
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000193- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
194 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
195 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
196 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
197
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000198- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
199 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
200 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
201 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
202 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000203
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000204- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
205 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
206
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000207Extension modules
208-----------------
209
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000210- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
211
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000212- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
213 data.
214
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000215- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
216 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
217 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
218 supposed to have been truncated away.
219
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000220- Added socket.socketpair().
221
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000222- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
223 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
224
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000225- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000226 versions of Python, have now been removed.
227
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000228Library
229-------
230
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000231- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000232 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000233
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000234- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
235 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
236
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000237- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
238 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
239
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000240- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
241
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000242- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
243 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000244
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000245- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
246 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
247
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000248- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
249
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000250- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
251
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000252- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
253
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000254- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
255 Percivall.
256
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000257- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
258 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
259
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000260- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
261 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
262 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000263 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000264
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000265- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
266 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
267 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
268 and exponent.
269
270- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
271
272- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
273 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
274 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
275
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000276- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
277 to the readline module.
278
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000279- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000280 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
281 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000282
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000283- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
284 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
285 contains symlinks.
286
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000287- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
288 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
289
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000290- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
291 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
292 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
293
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000294- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
295 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
296 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
297 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
298 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
299 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
300 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
301 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
302 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
303 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
304 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
305 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
306 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
307
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000308- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
309
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000310Tools/Demos
311-----------
312
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000313- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
314 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
315
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000316- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
317
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000318Build
319-----
320
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000321- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
322 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
323 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
324 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
325 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
326 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
327 plans to do so.
328
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000329- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
330 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
331
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000332- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
333 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
334
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000335- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
336 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
337
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000338- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
339 GNU/k*BSD systems.
340
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000341- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
342 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
343
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000344C API
345-----
346
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000347..
348
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000349Documentation
350-------------
351
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000352- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
353 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
354
355- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
356 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
357 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000358
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000359New platforms
360-------------
361
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000362- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
363
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000364Tests
365-----
366
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000367..
368
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000369Windows
370-------
371
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000372- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
373 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
374 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
375 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
376 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
377 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
378 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
379 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
380 the problem.
381
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000382Mac
383---
384
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000385..
386
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000387
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000388What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
389=================================
390
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000391*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000392
393Core and builtins
394-----------------
395
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000396- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
397 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
398 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
399 sensitive code.
400
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000401- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000402 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000403
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000404 @staticmethod
405 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000406
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000407 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000408
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000409- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
410 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
411 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
412 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
413 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
414 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
415 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
416 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
417 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
418 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
419 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
420
421 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
422 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
423 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
424 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
425 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
426 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
427 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
428
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000429- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
430 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
431
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000432- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000433 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000434
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000435- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000436 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000437 which was missing for no apparent reason.
438
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000439- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000440 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
441 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
442
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000443- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
444 types that support garbage collection.
445
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000446- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
447
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000448- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
449 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
450 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
451 Jython.
452
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000453- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
454
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000455- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
456 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
457
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000458- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
459 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
460 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000461
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000462- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
463 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
464 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
465
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000466Extension modules
467-----------------
468
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000469- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
470
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000471Library
472-------
473
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000474- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
475 TIS-620
476
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000477- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
478 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
479 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
480 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
481 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
482 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
483 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
484 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
485 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
486 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
487
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000488- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
489
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000490- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
491 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
492 same as when the argument is omitted).
493 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
494
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000495- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
496
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000497- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
498 schemes are offered.
499
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000500- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
501
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000502- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
503 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
504 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
505
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000506- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
507
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000508- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
509 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
510
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000511- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
512 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
513 when dummy_threading is being used.
514
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000515- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
516 from a tarfile.
517
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000518- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000519 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000520
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000521- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
522 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
523 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
524 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
525
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000526- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
527 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
528
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000529- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
530 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
531 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
532 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
533 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
534 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
535 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
536 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
537 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
538 by some other method in progress).
539
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000540- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
541 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
542 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000543
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000544- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
545
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000546- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
547 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
548 AM Kuchling.
549
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000550- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
551 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
552 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
553
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000554- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
555 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
556 instead of unsigned.
557
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000558- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000559 no longer part of the public API.
560
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000561- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
562 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
563 string methods of the same name).
564
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000565- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000566 SF patch 945642.
567
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000568- doctest unittest integration improvements:
569
570 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
571
572 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
573 DocTestSuites.
574
575- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
576 that provide thread-local data.
577
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000578- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
579 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
580
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000581- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
582
583- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
584 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
585 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
586
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000587- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
588
589 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
590 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
591 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000592
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000593 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
594 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
595 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
596 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
597
598 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
599 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
600
601 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
602 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
603 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
604 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
605
606 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
607 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
608 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
609 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
610 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
611
612 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
613 wrapping help output.
614
615 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
616 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
617 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000618
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000619C API
620-----
621
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000622- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
623 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
624 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
625 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
626 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
627 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
628 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
629 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
630 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
631 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
632 its visible semantics have not changed.
633
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000634- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
635 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
636
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000637Documentation
638-------------
639
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000640- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000641
642 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000643 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000644
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000645 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000646
647 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
648
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000649- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000650
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000651Tests
652-----
653
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000654- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000655 platforms that use the Makefile.
656
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000657- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
658 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
659 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
660
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000661
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000662What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
663=================================
664
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000665*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000666
667Core and builtins
668-----------------
669
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000670- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
671 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
672 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
673 objects now (one object instead of three).
674
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000675- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
676 Windows DLLs.
677
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000678- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
679 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000680
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000681- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
682 a new .pyc magic.
683
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000684- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
685 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
686 be there.
687
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000688- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
689 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
690 the LC_NUMERIC category.
691
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000692- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
693 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
694 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
695
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000696- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
697
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000698- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
699 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
700 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000701
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000702- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
703 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
704
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000705- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
706
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000707- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000708 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000709
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000710- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
711
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000712- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
713
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000714- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
715 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
716
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000717- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
718 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
719 Fixes bug #858016 .
720
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000721- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
722 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
723 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
724
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000725- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
726 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
727 improves their performance (about 35%).
728
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000729- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
730 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
731 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
732
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000733- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
734 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
735 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
736 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
737
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000738- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
739 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
740 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
741 length is not known).
742
743- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
744 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000745 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
746 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000747 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
748
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000749- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
750 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
751
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000752- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
753 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
754 keyword arguments.
755
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000756- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
757 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
758 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
759
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000760- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
761 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
762 cases.
763
764- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
765 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
766 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
767 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
768 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
769 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
770 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
771 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
772 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
773 a release build.
774
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000775- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
776 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
777
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000778- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000779 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000780
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000781- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
782 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
783 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
784 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
785 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
786 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
787 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
788 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
789 destroyed.
790
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000791- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
792 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
793 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
794 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
795 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
796 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
797 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
798 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
799
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000800- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
801 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
802 character other than a space.
803
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000804- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
805 by the function object or by the method object, the function
806 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
807 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
808 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
809 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
810 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
811 attributes with the same name.
812
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000813- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
814 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
815 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
816 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
817 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
818 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
819 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
820 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
821 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
822 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
823 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
824 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
825 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
826 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000827
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000828- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
829 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
830 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
831 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
832 This has been repaired.
833
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000834- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
835
836- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
837
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000838- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
839 over a sequence.
840
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000841- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000842 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000843
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000844- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
845
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000846- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
847 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
848 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
849 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
850 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
851 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
852 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
853 records with equal keys is unchanged).
854
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000855- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
856 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
857 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
858
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000859- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
860 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
861 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
862 freelist.
863
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000864- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
865 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
866
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000867- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
868 number.
869
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000870- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
871 a TypeError exception.
872
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000873- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
874 820195.
875
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000876- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
877 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
878 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
879
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000880- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000881 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
882 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000883
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000884- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
885 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
886 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
887
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000888- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
889 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000890 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000891
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000892- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000893 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
894 the first call.
895
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000896
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000897Extension modules
898-----------------
899
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000900- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
901 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
902
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000903- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
904 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
905 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
906 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
907 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
908 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
909 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000910
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000911- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
912
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000913- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
914
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000915- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
916 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
917
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000918- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
919 fewer false positives.
920
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000921- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
922 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
923
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000924- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000925 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
926
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000927- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000928 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000929 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +0000930 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
931 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000932
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000933- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
934 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
935 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
936 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
937
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000938- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
939 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
940 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
941 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
942 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
943 #897625.
944
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000945- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
946 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
947
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000948- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
949 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
950 and pops on either side of the deque.
951
952- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
953 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
954
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000955- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
956 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
957 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
958 other functions that expect a function argument.
959
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000960- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
961
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000962- os.getsid was added.
963
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000964- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
965 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
966 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
967
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000968- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
969
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000970- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
971
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000972- readline.clear_history was added.
973
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000974- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
975
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000976- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
977
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000978- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
979
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000980- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
981
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000982- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
983
984- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
985
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000986- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
987
988- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
989
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000990- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
991 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
992 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
993
994- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
995 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
996 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
997 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
998 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
999 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1000 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1001
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001002- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1003 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1004 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1005 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001006
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001007- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001008 iterators from a single iterable.
1009
1010- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1011 of raising a TypeError exception.
1012
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001013- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1014 as parameter.
1015
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001016Library
1017-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001018
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001019- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1020 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1021 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001022
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001023- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1024 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1025 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001026
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001027- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001028
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001029- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1030 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001031
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001032- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1033 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1034
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001035- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1036
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001037- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001038 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001039
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001040- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001041 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001042
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001043- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1044
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001045- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1046 on cygwin and mingw32.
1047
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001048- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1049
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001050- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1051 module.
1052
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001053- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1054 installation scheme for all platforms.
1055
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001056- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001057 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001058
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001059- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1060 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1061 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1062
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001063- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1064 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1065 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1066
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001067- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1068
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001069- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1070
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001071- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1072 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1073
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001074- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1075 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1076 type pattern with the same value exists.
1077
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001078- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1079 when run from the command prompt).
1080
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001081- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1082 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1083
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001084- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1085 default sort).
1086
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001087- Added global runctx function to profile module
1088
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001089- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1090
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001091- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1092
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001093- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1094
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001095- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001096 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1097 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1098 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1099 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1100 accordingly.
1101
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001102- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1103 decoding standards.
1104
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001105- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1106 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1107 called for all requests.
1108
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001109- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1110 they are passed to the compiler.
1111
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001112- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1113 indent, width and depth.
1114
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001115- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1116 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1117
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001118- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1119 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1120
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001121- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1122
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001123- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1124
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001125- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1126
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001127- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1128 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1129
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001130- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001131 for better performance.
1132
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001133- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001134
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001135- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1136 a string).
1137
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001138- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1139
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001140- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1141
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001142- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1143
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001144- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1145
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001146- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1147 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1148 list of fieldnames.
1149
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001150- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1151 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1152
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001153- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1154
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001155- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1156 empty lists.
1157
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001158- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1159 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1160 and shelves.
1161
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001162- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1163 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1164
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001165- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001166 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1167 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001168
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001169- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1170 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001171 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001172
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001173- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001174 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1175 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1176
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001177- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1178 and removed in Py2.4.
1179
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001180- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1181
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001182- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1183
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001184Tools/Demos
1185-----------
1186
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001187- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1188 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1189
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001190- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1191
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001192- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1193 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1194 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1195 destination in situations where both files are given.
1196
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001197- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1198 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1199 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1200 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1201
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001202- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1203
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001204- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1205 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1206 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1207 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1208 now.
1209
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001210- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1211 in effect
1212
1213- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1214 C-c C-h
1215
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001216- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1217 -d option was given.
1218
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001219Build
1220-----
1221
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001222- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1223 build under OS X.
1224
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001225- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1226 --enable-profiling.
1227
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001228- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1229 is configured --with-tsc.
1230
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001231- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1232 on AMD64.
1233
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001234- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1235 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1236
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001237- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1238 removed.
1239
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001240- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1241 supported (see PEP 11).
1242
1243- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1244
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001245- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1246
1247- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1248 (see PEP 11).
1249
1250- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1251 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1252
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001253C API
1254-----
1255
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001256- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1257 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1258 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1259
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001260- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1261 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1262 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1263 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1264
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001265- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1266 generator objects.
1267
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001268- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1269 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001270 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1271 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001272
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001273- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1274 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1275
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001276- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1277 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1278 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1279 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1280 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1281
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001282- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1283 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1284 about 10% faster.
1285
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001286- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1287 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1288
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001289- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1290 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1291 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1292 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1293
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001294Windows
1295-------
1296
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001297- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1298 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1299 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1300 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1301
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001302- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1303 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1304 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1305
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001306
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001307What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1308===============================
1309
1310*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1311
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001312IDLE
1313----
1314
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001315- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1316 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1317 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1318 context-menu actions.
1319
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001320- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1321 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1322 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1323 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1324 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1325 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1326 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1327 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1328 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1329
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001330
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001331What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1332=============================================
1333
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001334*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001335
1336Core and builtins
1337-----------------
1338
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001339- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001340 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001341 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1342
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001343Extension modules
1344-----------------
1345
1346- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1347 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1348 than once. This has been fixed.
1349
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001350- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1351 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1352 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1353 call.
1354
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001355- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1356
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001357Library
1358-------
1359
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001360- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1361 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1362
1363- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1364 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1365 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1366 restored.
1367
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001368IDLE
1369----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001370
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001371- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001372
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001373Build
1374-----
1375
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001376- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1377 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1378
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001379C API
1380-----
1381
1382Windows
1383-------
1384
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001385- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1386 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1387
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001388- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1389
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001390Mac
1391---
1392
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001393- Various fixes to pimp.
1394
1395- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1396
1397- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1398 more problems than it solves.
1399
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001400
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001401What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1402=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001403
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001404*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1405
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001406Core and builtins
1407-----------------
1408
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001409- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1410 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1411
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001412- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1413 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001414 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001415
1416- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1417 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1418 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001419 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001420
1421- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1422 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001423
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001424- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1425 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1426 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1427
1428- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001429 770247.
1430
1431- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001432
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001433Extension modules
1434-----------------
1435
1436- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1437 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1438
1439- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1440
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001441- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1442
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001443- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1444 contained within the _strptime module.
1445
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001446- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1447 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1448
1449- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001450 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1451
1452- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1453 the find_class attribute, if present.
1454
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001455- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001456
1457 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1458 (SF bug 763298).
1459
1460 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001461 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1462 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1463 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001464
1465 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1466
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001467Library
1468-------
1469
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001470- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1471
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001472- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1473 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1474 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1475 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1476 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1477 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1478 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1479 or Tester().
1480
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001481- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1482 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1483 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1484 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1485 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1486 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1487 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1488 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1489 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001490
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001491 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001492
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001493- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1494 weren't before was an oversight.
1495
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001496- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1497 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1498
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001499- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1500 when there are no lines.
1501
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001502- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1503 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1504
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001505- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1506 to child processes.
1507
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001508- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1509
1510- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1511
1512- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1513 xmlrpclib.
1514
1515- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1516 responses.
1517
1518- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1519 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1520
1521- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1522 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1523 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1524
1525- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1526 used as patterns.
1527
1528- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1529 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1530 than Tk 8.3.
1531
1532- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1533
1534- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001535
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001536Tools/Demos
1537-----------
1538
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001539- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1540
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001541- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1542
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001543- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001544
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001545Build
1546-----
1547
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001548- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1549
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001550- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1551
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001552- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1553 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001554
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001555- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1556 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1557 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001558
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001559C API
1560-----
1561
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001562- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1563 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1564
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001565Windows
1566-------
1567
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001568- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1569 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1570 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1571 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1572 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1573 Python exception ::
1574
1575 thread.error: can't start new thread
1576
1577 is raised now.
1578
1579- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1580 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1581 instead of from DLL teardown.
1582
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001583Mac
1584---
1585
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001586- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001587 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001588 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1589 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1590 the executable in the bundle.
1591
1592- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001593
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001594- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1595
1596- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1597 on Panther.
1598
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001599What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1600================================
1601
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001602*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001603
1604Core and builtins
1605-----------------
1606
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001607- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1608 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1609 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1610 with the -i option.
1611
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001612- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1613 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1614
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001615- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1616 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1617
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001618- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1619 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1620 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1621 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1622 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1623 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1624 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1625 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1626 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1627 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1628 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1629 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1630 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001631
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001632- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1633 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1634 embedded in a lambda expression.
1635
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001636- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1637 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1638 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1639 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1640 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1641
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001642- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1643 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1644 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1645
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001646- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1647 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1648
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001649- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1650 It's writable again.
1651
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001652- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1653 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1654 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001655 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001656
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001657- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1658 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1659 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1660
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001661Extension modules
1662-----------------
1663
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001664- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1665 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1666
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001667- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1668 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1669 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1670 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1671
1672- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1673 collection.
1674
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001675- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1676 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1677 unique within a single program run.
1678
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001679- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1680 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1681
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001682- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1683 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1684
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001685- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1686 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001687
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001688- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1689
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001690- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1691 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1692
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001693- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1694 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1695 for many BSD-derived systems.
1696
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001697
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001698Library
1699-------
1700
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001701- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1702 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1703 primary ones:
1704
1705 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1706 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1707 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1708
1709 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1710 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1711 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1712 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1713 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1714 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1715
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001716- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1717 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1718 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1719 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1720 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1721 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1722 argument.
1723
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001724- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1725 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1726 in the archive.
1727
1728- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1729 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1730
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001731- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1732 569574).
1733
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001734- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1735 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1736 no more.
1737
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001738- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1739 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1740 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1741 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1742 code coverage.
1743
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001744- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1745 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1746 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001747 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1748 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001749
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001750- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1751 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1752 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001753 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001754
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001755- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1756
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001757- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1758 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1759 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1760 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1761
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001762- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1763 handling.
1764
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001765- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1766 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1767
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001768- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1769 in socket.py.
1770
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001771- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1772
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001773- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1774 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1775 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1776 opener with proxy support.
1777
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001778- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1779
1780- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1781
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001782Tools/Demos
1783-----------
1784
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001785- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1786
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001787- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1788
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001789- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1790 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001791
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001792- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1793 files.
1794
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001795Build
1796-----
1797
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001798- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001799 different root directory.
1800
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001801C API
1802-----
1803
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001804- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1805 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1806 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1807 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1808 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1809 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1810 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1811 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1812 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1813 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1814
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001815- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1816 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1817 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1818 from Python.
1819
1820
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001821New platforms
1822-------------
1823
1824None this time.
1825
1826Tests
1827-----
1828
1829- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1830 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1831
1832Windows
1833-------
1834
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001835- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1836
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001837- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1838 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1839 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1840 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1841 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1842 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1843 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1844 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1845 that's what it's for.
1846
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001847Mac
1848---
1849
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001850- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1851 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1852 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1853 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001854- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1855 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1856- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001857
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001858SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1859------------------------------------
1860
1861430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1862598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1863622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1864661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1865683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1866697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1867713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1868724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1869727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1870729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1871730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1872731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1873732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1874733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1875735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1876740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1877744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1878745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1879747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1880749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1881751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1882753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1883755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1884757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1885760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1886
1887
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001888What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1889================================
1890
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001891*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001892
1893Core and builtins
1894-----------------
1895
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001896- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1897 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1898
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001899- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1900 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1901 and cannot be strings).
1902
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001903- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1904 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1905 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1906 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1907
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001908- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1909 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1910 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1911 Python itself.
1912
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001913- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1914 the referenced object, if it has one.
1915
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001916- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1917 the thread started at
1918 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1919
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001920- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1921 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1922 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1923 placed on a list index.
1924
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001925- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1926 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1927 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1928 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1929
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001930- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1931 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1932 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1933 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1934 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1935 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1936 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1937
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001938- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1939 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1940 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1941 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1942 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1943
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001944- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1945 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001946
1947- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1948 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1949 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1950 #693195.)
1951
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001952- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1953 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001954
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001955- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001956 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001957 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1958 interpreter executions, would fail.
1959
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001960- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001961 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001962 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001963
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001964Extension modules
1965-----------------
1966
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001967- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1968 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1969 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1970 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1971
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001972- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1973 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1974
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001975- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1976 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1977 and Greg Chapman.)
1978
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001979- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1980 recursively.
1981
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001982- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001983 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1984 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1985 leaks.
1986
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001987- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1988
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001989- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1990 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1991 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1992 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1993 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1994 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1995 #705836.
1996
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001997- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001998 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1999
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002000- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2001 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2002 See SF bug #692416.
2003
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002004- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2005 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2006
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002007- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2008 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2009 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002010
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002011- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002012 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2013 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2014
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002015- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2016 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2017 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2018 timeouts to work properly.
2019
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002020Library
2021-------
2022
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002023- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2024 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2025 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2026 future release.
2027
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002028- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2029 for querying platform dependent features.
2030
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002031- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002032
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002033- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2034 pickle protocol versions.
2035
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002036- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2037 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2038 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2039
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002040- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2041
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002042- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2043 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2044 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2045 modules.
2046
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002047- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2048 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2049 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2050
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002051- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2052 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2053
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002054- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2055 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2056 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2057
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002058- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002059 MS Office extensions.
2060
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002061- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2062 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2063
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002064- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2065 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2066
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002067- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2068 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2069 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2070 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2071 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2072 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2073
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002074- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2075 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2076 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002077
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002078- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2079 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2080 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2081
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002082- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2083
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002084- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2085 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2086 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2087
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002088Tools/Demos
2089-----------
2090
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002091- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2092 See the module docstring for details.
2093
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002094Build
2095-----
2096
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002097- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2098 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002099
2100C API
2101-----
2102
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002103- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2104
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002105- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2106 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2107 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2108
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002109- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2110 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002111
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002112 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2113 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2114 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002115
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002116- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002117 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2118
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002119- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2120 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2121 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002122
2123New platforms
2124-------------
2125
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002126None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002127
2128Tests
2129-----
2130
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002131- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2132 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002133
2134Windows
2135-------
2136
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002137- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2138 function.
2139
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002140- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2141 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002142
2143Mac
2144---
2145
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002146- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2147 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002148
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002149- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2150 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002151
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002152- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2153 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2154 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002155
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002156- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002157 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2158 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002159
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002160- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2161 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002162
2163
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002164What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2165=================================
2166
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002167*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002168
2169Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002170-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002171
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002172- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2173 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2174 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2175
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002176- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2177 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2178 (SF patch #664376.)
2179
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002180- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2181 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2182 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2183 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2184 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2185 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002186 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002187
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002188- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2189 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2190 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2191 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002192 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002193
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002194- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2195 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2196 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2197 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2198 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2199 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2200 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2201 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2202 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2203 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2204 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2205
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002206- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2207 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2208 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2209 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2210 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2211 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2212
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002213- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2214 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2215
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002216- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2217 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2218 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2219 case.)
2220
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002221- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2222 passed as unicode strings.
2223
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002224- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2225 See SF bug #683467.
2226
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002227- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2228 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2229
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002230- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2231
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002232- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2233
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002234- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2235 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2236 arguments.
2237
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002238- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2239 See SF bug #667147.
2240
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002241- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002242 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002243 See SF bug #676155.
2244
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002245- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002246 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002247 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2248 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2249 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2250 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2251 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2252 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002253
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002254Extension modules
2255-----------------
2256
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002257- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2258 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2259 tp_as_number pointer.
2260
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002261- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2262 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2263 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2264 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2265 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2266
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002267- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2268
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002269- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2270
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002271- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002272 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002273 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2274 patch #678531.)
2275
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002276- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2277 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2278
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002279- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2280 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2281
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002282- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2283
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002284- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2285 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2286 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2287
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002288- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2289
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002290- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2291 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2292
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002293- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002294
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002295- datetime changes:
2296
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002297 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2298
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002299 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2300 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2301 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2302 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2303 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2304 now.
2305
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002306 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002307 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2308 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002309
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002310 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002311 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002312 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2313 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2314 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2315 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002316
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002317 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2318 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2319 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002320 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2321
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002322 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2323 by a later example coded by Guido.
2324
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002325 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002326 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2327 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2328 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002329 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2330 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2331
2332 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2333 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2334 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2335 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2336 tzinfo subclass instance.
2337
2338 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2339 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2340 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2341 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2342 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2343 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2344 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2345 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002346
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002347 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2348 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2349 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2350 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2351 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002352 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2353
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002354 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002355
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002356 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2357 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2358 as a naive datetime object.
2359
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002360 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2361 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2362 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2363
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002364 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2365 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2366 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2367 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2368 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2369 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2370 comparison.
2371
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002372 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2373 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2374 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2375 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002376 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002377
2378 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002379
2380 and ::
2381
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002382 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2383
2384 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2385 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2386 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2387 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2388
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002389 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2390 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2391 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2392 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2393 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2394
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002395 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2396 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002397 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2398 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002399
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002400Library
2401-------
2402
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002403- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2404 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2405
2406- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2407 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2408 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2409 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2410 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2411 See PEP 307 for details.
2412
2413- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2414 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2415
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002416- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2417 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002418 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002419 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2420 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002421 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002422
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002423- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2424 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2425
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002426- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2427 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2428 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2429
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002430- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2431
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002432- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2433 exception.
2434
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002435- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2436 class.
2437
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002438- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2439 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2440 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2441
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002442- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2443 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2444
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002445- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002446 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2447 See SF bug #659228.
2448
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002449- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2450 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2451 See SF patch #651082.
2452
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002453- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002454
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002455- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2456 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2457
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002458- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002459 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002460
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002461- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2462 DOS paths from other platforms.
2463
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002464Tools/Demos
2465-----------
2466
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002467- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2468 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2469 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2470 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2471 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2472 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2473 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2474 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2475 example:
2476
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002477 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2478 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002479
2480 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2481
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002482
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002483Build
2484-----
2485
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002486- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2487 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2488 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002489 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2490
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002491 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2492
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002493- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2494 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2495 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2496 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2497 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2498 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2499 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2500 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2501 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2502
2503- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2504 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2505 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2506 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2507
2508- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2509 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2510
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002511C API
2512-----
2513
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002514- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2515 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002516
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002517- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2518 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2519 tp_as_number pointer.
2520
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002521- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2522 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2523 (SF #681367)
2524
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002525- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2526 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2527 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2528 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002529
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002530Tests
2531-----
2532
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002533- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002534 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2535 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2536 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2537 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2538 pydoc.)
2539
2540- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2541
2542- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002543
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002544Windows
2545-------
2546
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002547- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2548 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2549 time).
2550
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002551- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2552 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2553
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002554- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2555 release without strong cryptography.
2556
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002557- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002558 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002559
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002560- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2561 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2562
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002563Mac
2564---
2565
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002566- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2567 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002568
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002569- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2570 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2571 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002572
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002573- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2574 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002575
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002576- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2577 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2578 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2579 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002580
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002581- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002582 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2583 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2584 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002585
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002586
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002587What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002588=================================
2589
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002590*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002591
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002592Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002593--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002594
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002595- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2596
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002597- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2598 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002599 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002600 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002601 a different meaning than before.
2602
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002603- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002604 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002605 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002606
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002607- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002608 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002609 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002610
2611- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2612 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2613 and deallocation.
2614
2615- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2616 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2617
2618- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2619 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2620 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2621 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2622 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2623
2624- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2625 now detected by the garbage collector.
2626
2627- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2628 [SF bug 519621]
2629
2630- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2631 identifier.
2632
2633- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2634 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2635 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2636 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2637 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2638 [SF bug 563060]
2639
2640- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2641 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2642 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2643 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2644 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2645
2646- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2647 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2648 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2649
2650- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2651
2652- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2653 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2654 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2655 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2656 state of the slots would be lost.)
2657
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002658Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002659-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002660
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002661- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002662 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2663 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2664 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2665 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002666 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2667 Jython 2.1.
2668
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002669- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002670 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002671 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2672 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2673 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2674 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2675 these, see PEP 302.
2676
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002677- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2678 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2679 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2680
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002681- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2682 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2683 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2684
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002685- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2686 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2687 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2688
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002689- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2690 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2691 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2692 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2693 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2694 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2695 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2696 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2697 releases or implementations.
2698
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002699- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002700 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2701 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002702
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002703- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2704 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2705
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002706- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2707 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2708 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2709
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002710- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2711 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2712
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002713- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2714 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002715 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2716 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002717
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002718- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2719 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2720 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2721 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2722 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2723
2724 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2725 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2726 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2727 pattern.
2728
2729 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2730 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2731 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2732 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2733
2734 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2735 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2736 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2737 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2738 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2739 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2740
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002741- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2742 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2743 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2744 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2745 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2746 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2747 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2748 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002749
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002750- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2751 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2752 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2753 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2754 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002755 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2756 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2757 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2758 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2759 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2760 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2761 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002762
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002763- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2764 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2765
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002766- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2767 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2768 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2769 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2770 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2771 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2772 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2773 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2774 to Zack Weinberg!
2775
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002776- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2777 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2778 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2779 type. This has been fixed now.
2780
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002781- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2782 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2783 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2784
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002785- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2786 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2787 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2788 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2789 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2790 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2791 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2792 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002793 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002794
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002795- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2796 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2797 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002798
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002799- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2800 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2801 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2802 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2803 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2804 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2805 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2806 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002807 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002808 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2809 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2810
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002811- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2812 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2813 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2814 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2815 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2816 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2817 this.)
2818
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002819- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2820 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002821 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002822 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002823 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2824 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002825 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2826 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002827
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002828- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2829 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2830 currently running.
2831
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002832- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2833 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2834 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2835 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2836
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002837- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2838 as directory names.
2839
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002840- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2841 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2842
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002843- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2844 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2845
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002846- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002847 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2848 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002849
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002850- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2851 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2852 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2853 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2854 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2855
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002856- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2857 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2858 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2859 removed.
2860
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002861- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2862 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2863 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2864
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002865- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2866 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2867 to __debug__.
2868
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002869- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2870 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2871 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2872
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002873- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2874 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2875 deprecated now.
2876
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002877- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2878 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2879 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002880
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002881- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2882 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2883 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2884 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2885 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002886
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002887- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2888 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2889
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002890- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2891 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2892 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002893 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002894 is backward compatible.
2895
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002896- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2897 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2898 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2899 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2900 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2901
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002902- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2903 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2904 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2905 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2906 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2907 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002908
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002909- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2910 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2911
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002912- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2913 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2914
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002915- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2916 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2917 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2918 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2919 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2920
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002921- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2922 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2923 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2924
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002925- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002926 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2927
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002928- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2929 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2930 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002931
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002932- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2933 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2934
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002935- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2936 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2937 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2938
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002939- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2940
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002941Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002942-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002943
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002944- Added three operators to the operator module:
2945 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2946 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2947 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2948
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002949- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2950
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002951- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2952 archives.
2953
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002954- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2955 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2956 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2957
2958 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2959
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002960- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2961 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2962 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002963 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002964
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002965- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2966 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2967 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2968 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002969 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2970 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2971 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2972 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002973
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002974- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2975 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002976
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002977- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2978
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002979- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2980 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2981
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002982- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2983 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2984 supported.
2985
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002986- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2987
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002988- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2989 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002990
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002991- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2992 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2993
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002994- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2995
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002996- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2997 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2998
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002999- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3000 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3001 functions but callable type objects.
3002
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003003- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003004 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003005 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003006
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003007- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3008 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003009
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003010- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3011 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003012
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003013- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3014 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3015 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3016 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3017
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003018- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3019 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003020
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003021- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3022 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3023 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3024 and __imul__.
3025
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003026- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003027 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3028 is called.
3029
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003030- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3031 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3032 interpreter was compiled.
3033
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003034- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3035 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3036 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003037 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003038 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3039 1, not 2.
3040
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003041- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3042 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3043 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3044 limit.
3045
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003046- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3047 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3048 bug #623464.
3049
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003050- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3051 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3052 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3053 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3054
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003055Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003056-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003057
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003058- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3059
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003060- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3061 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3062 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3063 with Python 2.3a2.
3064
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003065- os.path exposes getctime.
3066
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003067- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003068 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003069 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003070 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003071 unit tests of floating point results.
3072
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003073- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3074 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3075 has been increased.
3076
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003077- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3078 executed.
3079
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003080- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3081 postinstallation script.
3082
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003083- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3084 test the current module.
3085
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003086- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003087 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3088 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3089 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3090 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3091
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003092- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003093 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003094 Ward's Optik package.
3095
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003096- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3097 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3098 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3099 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3100
3101- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3102 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003103 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003104
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003105- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3106 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3107 shelf are binary pickles.
3108
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003109- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3110 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3111
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003112- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3113 modules are iterators now.
3114
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003115- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3116 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3117 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3118 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3119 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3120 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003121
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003122- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3123 with their entity value.
3124
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003125- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3126
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003127- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3128 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003129
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003130- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3131 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003132 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003133
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003134- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3135 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3136 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3137 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3138 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3139 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3140 main():
3141
3142 import locale
3143 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3144
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003145- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3146 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3147
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003148- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3149 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3150 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3151 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3152 to the new standard.
3153
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003154- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3155 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3156 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3157 an extension to the database.
3158
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003159- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3160 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3161 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3162 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003163 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003164
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003165- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003166 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003167
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003168- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3169 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3170 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3171 bounded integers.
3172
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003173- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3174 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3175 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3176 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3177 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3178 in existence.
3179
3180 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3181 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3182 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3183 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3184 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3185 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3186
3187 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3188 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3189 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3190 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3191
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003192- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3193 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3194 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3195
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003196- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3197
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003198- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3199 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3200 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3201 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3202
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003203- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3204 argument.
3205
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003206- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3207 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3208 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3209 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3210 [SF patch 560794].
3211
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003212- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3213 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3214 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003215 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3216 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3217 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003218
3219- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3220 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003221
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003222- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3223 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3224 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3225 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003226
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003227- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3228 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3229 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3230 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3231 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3232
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003233- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003234
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003235- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3236
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003237- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3238 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3239 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3240 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3241 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3242 identical to None.
3243
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003244- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3245 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3246 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3247 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3248 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3249 results now.
3250
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003251- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3252 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3253
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003254- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3255 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3256 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3257 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3258 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3259 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3260 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3261 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3262
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003263- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3264
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003265- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3266 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3267
3268- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3269 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3270 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3271 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3272 and other systems.
3273
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003274- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3275 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3276 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3277 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 +00003278 work well with these.
3279
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003280- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3281
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003282- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003283 connections.
3284
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003285- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3286 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3287 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3288
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003289- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3290 sets
3291
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003292- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3293 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3294 name.
3295
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003296- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3297 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3298 passed in.
3299
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003300- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003301 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003302 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3303 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003304
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003305- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3306
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003307- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3308
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003309- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3310 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3311 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3312
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003313- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3314 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3315 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3316 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003317 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003318
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003319- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003320 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003321 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003322
3323- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3324 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3325 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3326
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003327- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003328 the value of its expression argument.
3329
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003330- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3331 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3332 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3333
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003334- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3335 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3336 skipstone browser was included.
3337
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003338- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3339 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3340
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003341Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003342-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003343
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003344- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3345 names in addition to accepting file names.
3346
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003347- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3348 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3349 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3350 still used and useful.)
3351
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003352- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3353 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3354 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3355 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003356
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003357- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3358 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3359 the generated binary.
3360
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003361Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003362-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003363
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003364- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3365
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003366- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3367 except in the hands of experts.
3368
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003369- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003370 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3371 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3372 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003373
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003374- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3375 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3376 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3377 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3378 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3379 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3380 builds.
3381
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003382- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3383 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3384 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3385 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3386 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3387 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3388 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3389 new type.
3390
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003391- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003392
3393 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3394 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3395 positive infinities.
3396
3397 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3398 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3399 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3400 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3401 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3402 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3403 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3404
3405 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3406
3407 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3408
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003409- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3410 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3411 size of the executable.
3412
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003413- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3414 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3415 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3416 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003417
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003418- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3419
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003420- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3421 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3422 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003423
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003424- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3425 well as Unix.
3426
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003427- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3428 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3429 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3430 modules in the README file for details.
3431
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003432C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003433-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003434
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003435- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3436 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003437 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003438 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003439 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003440
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003441- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3442 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3443 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3444 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3445 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3446 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003447 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003448 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3449 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3450 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3451 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3452 aligned.)
3453
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003454- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3455 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3456 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3457
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003458- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3459 level.
3460
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003461- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3462 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3463 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3464 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3465 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3466
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003467- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3468 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3469 code.
3470
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003471- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3472 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3473 adjusting for negative indices.
3474
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003475- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3476 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3477 object.
3478
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003479- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3480 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3481 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3482
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003483- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3484 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003485
3486- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3487
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003488- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3489 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3490 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3491 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3492
3493- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3494
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003495- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003496
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003497- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003498 without going through the buffer API.
3499
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003500- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003501
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003502- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3503 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3504 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3505 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3506
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003507- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3508 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3509
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003510- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003511 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3512
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003513New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003514-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003515
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003516- OpenVMS is now supported.
3517
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003518- AtheOS is now supported.
3519
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003520- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3521
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003522- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3523
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003524Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003525-----
3526
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003527- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3528 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3529 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003530
3531Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003532-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003533
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003534- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3535 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3536 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3537 bugs.
3538 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003539 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003540 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3541 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003542 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003543
3544- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003545 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003546
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003547- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3548 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3549
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003550- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3551 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003552 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003553 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3554
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003555- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3556 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3557 use files" uninstall option).
3558
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003559- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3560
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003561- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3562 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3563
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003564- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3565 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3566 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3567
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003568- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3569 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3570 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3571 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3572 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003573 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3574 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3575 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003576
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003577- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003578 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003579 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3580 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3581 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3582 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3583 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3584 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3585 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3586 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3587 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3588 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3589 work around.
3590
3591- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3592 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3593 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3594 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3595 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3596 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3597 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3598 specified with O_CREAT too).
3599
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003600Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003601----
3602
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003603- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003604
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003605- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3606 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3607 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3608
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003609- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3610 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3611 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3612
3613- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3614 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3615 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3616 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3617 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3618 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3619 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3620 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003621
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003622- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3623 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3624 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003625
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003626- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3627 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3628 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3629 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3630 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003631
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003632- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3633 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3634 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003635
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003636- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3637 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003638
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003639- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3640 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3641 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3642 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3643 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003644
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003645- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3646 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3647 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3648
3649- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3650 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3651 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003652
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003653- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3654 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3655 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3656 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003657 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003658
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003659- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3660 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003661
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003662- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3663 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003664
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003665- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003666 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003667 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3668 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003669
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003670
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003671What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003672===============================
3673
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003674*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3675
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003676Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003677--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003678
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003679- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3680 with a custom metaclass.
3681
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003682Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003683-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003684
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003685- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3686 are proxies.
3687
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003688Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003689-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003690
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003691- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3692 very short strings.
3693
3694- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3695 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3696 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3697 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3698 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3699
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003700Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003701-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003702
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003703- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3704 close or delete time).
3705
3706- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3707 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3708
3709- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3710
3711- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003712 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003713
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003714Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003715-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003716
3717Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003718-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003719
3720C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003721-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003722
3723New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003724-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003725
3726Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003727-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003728
3729Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003730-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003731
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003732- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3733
3734- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3735 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3736
3737- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3738 deleted at process exit time.
3739
3740- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3741 in backslash.
3742
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003743Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003744----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003745
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003746- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3747 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3748 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3749
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003750
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003751What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003752===========================
3753
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003754*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3755
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003756Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003757--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003758
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003759- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3760 been extensively updated. See
3761
3762 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3763
3764 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3765
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003766- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3767 deleted!
3768
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003769- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3770 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3771 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3772 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3773 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3774
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003775- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3776
3777 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3778 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3779
3780 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3781 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3782 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3783 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3784 supported anyway.
3785
3786 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3787 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3788
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003789- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3790 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3791 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3792 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3793 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003794
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003795- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3796 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3797 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3798
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003799Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003800-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003801
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003802- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3803 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3804 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3805 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3806 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3807 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003808 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3809 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3810 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3811 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003812
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003813- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3814 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3815 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3816
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003817Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003818-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003819
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003820- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3821
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003822Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003823-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003824
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003825- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3826 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3827 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3828 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3829 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3830 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3831
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003832- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3833
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003834- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3835
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003836- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3837
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003838- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3839 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3840 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3841
3842- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3843
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003844Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003845-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003846
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003847- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3848 off a search on Google.
3849
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003850Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003851-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003852
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003853- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3854 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3855 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3856 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3857 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3858 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3859 other platforms should do likewise.
3860
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003861- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3862 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3863 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3864
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003865C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003866-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003867
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003868- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3869 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3870 producing key-value pairs.
3871
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003872- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003873 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003874 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3875 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3876 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3877 previously went unchallenged.
3878
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003879New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003880-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003881
3882Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003883-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003884
3885Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003886-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003887
3888Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003889----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003890
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003891- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3892 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003893
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003894- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3895 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3896 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3897 home.
3898
3899
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003900What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003901===========================
3902
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003903*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3904
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003905Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003906--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003907
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003908- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3909 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003910
3911 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003912 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003913
3914 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3915 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003916 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003917 This needs to be documented.
3918
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003919- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3920 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3921
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003922- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3923 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3924 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3925
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003926- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3927 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3928
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003929- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3930 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3931 class forbids it).
3932
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003933- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3934 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3935 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3936
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003937- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3938
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003939Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003940-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003941
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003942- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3943 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003944 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003945
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003946- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3947 (like 1 + '').
3948
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003949Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003950-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003951
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003952- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3953 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3954 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3955 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003956 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003957 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3958
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003959- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3960 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3961 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3962 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3963
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003964- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3965 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003966 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3967 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3968 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003969
3970- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3971 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003972
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003973- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3974 bytes on its input.
3975
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003976Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003977-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003978
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003979- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003980 convenience function.
3981
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003982- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3983 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3984 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003985 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3986 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3987 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3988 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3989 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3990 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003991
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003992- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3993 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3994 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3995 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3996
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003997- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3998 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3999 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4000
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004001- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4002 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4003 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4004 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4005
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004006- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4007 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004008 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004009 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4010 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4011 new -l and -e options.
4012
4013- statcache is now deprecated.
4014
4015- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4016 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004017 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004018 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4019 time properly taken into account.
4020
4021- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4022 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4023 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4024 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4025
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004026Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004027-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004028
4029Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004030-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004031
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004032- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4033 is built with libdb3 if available.
4034
4035- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4036
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004037C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004038-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004039
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004040- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4041 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4042 PySequence_Size().
4043
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004044- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4045
4046- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4047 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4048 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4049
4050- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4051 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4052
4053- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4054 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4055
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004056New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004057-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004058
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004059- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4060 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4061
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004062- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4063 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4064
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004065- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4066
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004067Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004068-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004069
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004070- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4071 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4072
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004073Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004074-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004075
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004076Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004077----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004078
4079- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4080 removed completely in the next release.
4081
4082- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4083 OSX.
4084
4085- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4086 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4087
4088- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4089
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004090
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004091What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004092===========================
4093
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004094*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4095
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004096Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004097--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004098
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004099- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004100 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004101 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004102 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4103 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004104 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4105 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004106 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4107 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004108
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004109- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4110 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4111
4112- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4113 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4114
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004115Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004116-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004117
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004118- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4119 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4120 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4121 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4122 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4123 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4124 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4125 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4126
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004127- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4128 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4129 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4130 example).
4131
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004132- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004133 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004134 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004135 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004136
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004137- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4138 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4139 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004140 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004141
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004142- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4143 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4144 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4145 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4146 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4147 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4148
4149 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4150
4151 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4152
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004153Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004154-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004155
4156- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4157
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004158- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4159
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004160- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4161 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004162
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004163- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4164 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4165 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4166 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4167 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4168 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004169 attributes.
4170
4171- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4172 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4173 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004174
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004175- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4176 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4177 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004178
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004179- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4180 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4181 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004182 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4183 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4184
4185- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4186 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004187
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004188Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004189-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004190
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004191- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4192 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4193
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004194- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4195 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4196 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4197 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4198
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004199- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4200 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4201 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4202 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4203
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004204 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4205 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4206 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4207 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4208 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4209 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4210 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4211 without losing information).
4212
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004213- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004214 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4215 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4216 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4217 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4218 module).
4219
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004220 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004221 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4222 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4223 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4224 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004225
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004226- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004227 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4228 encoding.
4229
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004230- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4231 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4232
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004233- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004234 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4235
4236- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4237 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4238 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4239 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4240
4241- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4242
4243- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4244 ON, and OFF.
4245
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004246- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4247 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4248
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004249Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004250-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004251
4252- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4253 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4254 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004255
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004256- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4257 been added: -X and -E.
4258
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004259Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004260-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004261
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004262- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4263 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4264
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004265C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004266-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004267
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004268- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4269 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4270 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4271 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4272 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4273
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004274- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4275 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4276 as long) arguments.
4277
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004278- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4279 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4280 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4281 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4282 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4283 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4284
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004285- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4286 input.
4287
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004288New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004289-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004290
4291Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004293
4294Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004295-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004296
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004297- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4298 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4299 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4300
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004301- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4302 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4303 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004304 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004305
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004306 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4307 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4308 import signal
4309 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004310
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004311 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004312 while 1:
4313 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004314 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004315 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4316 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4317 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4318 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004319
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004320
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004321What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4322===========================
4323
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004324*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4325
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004326Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004327--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004328
4329- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4330 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4331 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4332
4333- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4334 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4335 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4336 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4337 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4338 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4339 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004340
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004341- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004342 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004343 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4344 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4345 associate a docstring with a property.
4346
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004347- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4348 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4349 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4350 other built-in object types.
4351
4352- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4353 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4354 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4355 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4356 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4357
4358- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4359 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4360
4361- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4362 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004363 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004364 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4365 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4366 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4367 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4368 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4369
4370- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4371 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4372 class.
4373
4374- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4375 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4376 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4377 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4378
4379- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4380 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4381 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4382 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4383
4384- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4385 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4386
4387- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4388 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4389 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4390 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4391 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004392 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004393 with the same value as s.
4394
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004395- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4396
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004397Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004398----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004399
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004400- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4401
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004402- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4403 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4404 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4405 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4406 objects.
4407
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004408- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4409 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004410 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4411 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4412
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004413- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4414 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4415 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4416
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004417Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004418-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004419
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004420- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4421 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4422 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4423 by the instances.
4424
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004425- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4426 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4427 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4428
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004429- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4430 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4431 before the entire comparison is complete.
4432
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004433- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4434 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4435 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4436
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004437- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4438 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4439 getwriter().
4440
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004441- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4442 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4443
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004444- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004445 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4446 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4447
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004448- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4449 iterable object.
4450
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004451- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4452 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004453
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004454- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4455 authentication.
4456
4457- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4458 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004459
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004460- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004461 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4462 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4463 a sample driver.)
4464
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004465Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004466-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004467
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004468- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4469 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4470 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4471 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4472 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4473 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4474 kernel has large file support.
4475
4476- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4477 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4478 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4479 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4480 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4481
4482- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4483 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4484 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4485
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004486C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004487-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004488
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004489- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4490 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4491
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004492New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004493-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004494
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004495- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4496 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4497
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004498Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004499-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004500
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004501- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4502 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4503 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4504 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4505 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4506
4507- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4508 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4509 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4510 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4511
4512- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4513 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4514
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004515Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004516-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004517
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004518- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004519 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4520 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004521
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004522
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004523What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4524===========================
4525
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004526*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4527
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004528Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004529----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004530
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004531- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4532 big to represent as a C double.
4533
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004534- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4535 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4536 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4537 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4538 restriction).
4539
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004540- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4541 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4542 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4543 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4544 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4545
4546 >>> dir([])
4547 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4548 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4549 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4550 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4551 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4552 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4553 'reverse', 'sort']
4554
4555 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4556
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004557- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004558 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4559 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4560 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4561 OverflowError exception.
4562
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004563- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004564 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004565 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4566 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4567 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4568 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4569 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004570 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004571 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4572 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4573
4574 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4575 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4576 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4577 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004578
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004579- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004580 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4581 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4582 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4583 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4584 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4585 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4586 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4587 once it is created.
4588
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004589- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4590 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4591 (key, value) pairs.
4592
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004593- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004594 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4595 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4596
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004597- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4598 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4599 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4600 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4601 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004602
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004603- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004604 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4605 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4606
4607 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4608
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004609- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004610 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4611
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004612Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004613-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004614
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004615- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004616 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4617 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004618
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004619- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4620 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4621 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4622 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4623 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4624 in this area anymore).
4625
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004626- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4627 threading.Timer.
4628
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004629- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4630 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4631
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004632- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004633 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4634
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004635- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004636 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4637 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4638 converted to Python longs.
4639
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004640- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004641 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4642
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004643- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4644 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4645 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4646
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004647Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004648-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004649
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004650- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4651 division operators as per PEP 238.
4652
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004653Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004654-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004655
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004656- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4657 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4658 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4659 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4660
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004661C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004662-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004663
4664- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004665
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004666- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4667 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004668 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004669
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004670 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4671 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004672 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004673 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004674
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004675- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004676 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4677 module:
4678
4679 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004680
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004681 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4682 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004683
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004684 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4685 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004686
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004687 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4688
4689 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4690
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004691- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004692 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4693 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4694 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004695
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004696New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004697-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004698
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004699- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4700 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4701 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4702 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4703 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004704
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004705Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004706-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004707
4708Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004709-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004710
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004711- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4712 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4713 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4714 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004715 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4716 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4717 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4718 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4719 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004720
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004721- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004722 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4723
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004724
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004725What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4726===========================
4727
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004728*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4729
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004730Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004731-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004732
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004733- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4734 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4735
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004736- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4737 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4738 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004739
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004740- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4741 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4742 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4743 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004744
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004745- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4746
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004747- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004748
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004749Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004750-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004751
4752- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004753 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004754 the module docstring for details.
4755
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004756Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004757-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004758
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004759- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004760 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4761 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4762 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004763
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004764- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4765 Nick Mathewson.
4766
4767Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004768----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004769
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004770- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4771 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4772 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4773 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4774 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4775 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4776 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4777 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4778
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004779- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4780 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4781 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4782 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4783
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004784- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4785 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4786 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4787 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4788 come a long way).
4789
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004790- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4791 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4792 write filters for these warnings).
4793
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004794- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4795 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4796 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4797 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4798 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4799
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004800- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4801 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4802 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4803 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4804 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4805 older distribution.
4806
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004807Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004808-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004809
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004810- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4811 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004812 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004813
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004814- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4815 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4816 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4817
4818- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4819
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004820- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4821
4822- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4823
4824- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4825
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004826- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004827
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004828- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4829
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004830New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004831-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004832
4833C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004834-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004835
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004836- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4837 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4838 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4839 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4840 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4841 against buffer overruns.
4842
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004843- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004844 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4845 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004846 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4847 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4848 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4849
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004850- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4851 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4852 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4853 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4854 deprecated.
4855
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004856Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004857-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004858
4859- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4860 relevant is found.
4861
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004862
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004863What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004864===========================
4865
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004866*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4867
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004868Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004869----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004870
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004871- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4872 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4873 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4874 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4875 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4876 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4877 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4878 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004879 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004880 repaired.
4881
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004882- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004883 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004884 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4885 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4886 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4887 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4888 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4889 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4890 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4891 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4892
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004893- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4894 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4895 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4896 leading BMO character).
4897
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004898- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4899 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4900 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4901
4902 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4903 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4904 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004905
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004906 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4907 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4908 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4909 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4910 for various simple to use conversions.
4911
4912 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4913 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4914
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004915 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4916 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4917 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4918 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4919 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4920 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4921 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4922 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4923 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4924 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4925 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4926 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4927 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4928 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4929 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004930
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004931- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4932 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4933 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004934 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004935 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004936
4937 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004938 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4939 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4940 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4941 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4942 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004943 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4944 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004945
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004946 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4947 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4948 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004949 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004950
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004951- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4952 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4953 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4954 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4955 floating arithmetic,
4956
4957 x = 9007199254740992.0
4958 print long(x)
4959
4960 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4961 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4962 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4963 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4964 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4965 functions are of good quality).
4966
4967 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4968 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4969 algorithms to break.
4970
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004971- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4972 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4973 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4974 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4975 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4976 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4977 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4978 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4979 order.
4980
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004981- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4982 operation along the most common code paths.
4983
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004984- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4985 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4986
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004987- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4988 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4989 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4990 {}.update(UserDict())
4991
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004992- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4993 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4994 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4995 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4996 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4997 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4998 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4999 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5000
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005001- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005002 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005003
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005004 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005005 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5006 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005007 join() method of strings
5008 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005009 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5010 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005011 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005012 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005013
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005014- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5015 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5016
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005017- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5018 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5019
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005020- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5021 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5022 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5023 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5024
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005025- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5026 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005027 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005028 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5029 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005030
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005031- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5032
5033
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005034Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005035-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005036
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005037- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005038 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005039 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5040 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5041
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005042- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5043 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5044
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005045- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5046 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5047 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5048 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5049
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005050- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5051 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5052 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5053
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005054- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5055
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005056- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5057
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005058- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5059 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5060 that are still imported into string.py).
5061
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005062- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5063
5064- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5065 Now it does.
5066
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005067- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5068
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005069- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5070 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5071 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5072 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5073 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005074 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5075 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005076
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005077- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5078 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5079 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5080 'help(object)'.
5081
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005082Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005083-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005084
5085- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005086 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005087 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5088 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5089
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005090- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005091 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5092 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005093
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005094C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005095-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005096
5097- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5098 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005099
5100----
5101
5102**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**